Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Palm programming book
Review: Have you ever wanted to get into Palm programming, but were unsure about
how to go about it?Well wait no more, O'Reilly (I'm sure you know about them) has a really
great book on Palm Programming called "Palm OS Programming - The
developer's guide". This is one of the best programming books I have ever read, and I read
them daily. The content is clear and even though it includes extensive
source code examples is not boring - a typical problem with programming
books. The book starts with the special requirements of programming for mobile
organizer devices, and proceeds to develep a reasonable sized application,
right through to writing a desktop conduit. By the time you have finished
the book, you should be ready to create your own Palm program. The only thing I would change about the book is that it does not go into
handling categories in database items (IE GUI and coding examples), I'm
sure these are available from PalmSource, but I would have liked to have
it all in the book. I've always liked O'Reilly books, but this is absolutely the best I have
read yet.
Rating: 
Summary: Thin on the database coverage
Review: I actually developed my Palm application in Java with the Palm CDK and JUMP2. As mentioned in earlier reviews, this book is directed to C/C++ programmers using either CodeWarrior and GCC. I also found the information on Palm databases to be pretty shallow. In most cases the examples were pretty shallow and certainly did not provide too much insight on how the records on the desktop are sync'ed to the handheld. Even less was covered on how you might pull content via a web service or xml/http to the desktop. Need an example of where this book falls short... How do I create a .pdb file on my desktop?
Rating:
Summary: Thin on the database coverage
Review: I actually developed my Palm application in Java with the Palm CDK and JUMP2. As mentioned in earlier reviews, this book is directed to C/C++ programmers using either CodeWarrior and GCC. I also found the information on Palm databases to be pretty shallow. In most cases the examples were pretty shallow and certainly did not provide too much insight on how the records on the desktop are sync'ed to the handheld. Even less was covered on how you might pull content via a web service or xml/http to the desktop. Need an example of where this book falls short... How do I create a .pdb file on my desktop?
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding...a programming book that's actually fun to read
Review: I don't know what else to say other than to buy this book if you are: a) Interested in Palm programming
b) Curious about Palm programming
c) Already Palm programming
d) Wondering how to write a good book on programming To paraphrase Larry the Cucumber from VeggieTales, "I love this book!"
Rating: 
Summary: needs better sample programs
Review: I don't like the author's approach to sample programs. They show you everything presented in the context of some big application that they are writing. When they present a new concept, they show you a short code snippet illustrating the concept, then show you how they implement that concept in this bigger application. I would prefer a separate stand alone program that illustrates each new concept, (a la Petzold's "Windows Programming"). This makes it much easier to understand. I basically stop reading the chapter when I get to the part about how the new feature is implemented in their sales application.
Rating: 
Summary: Highly Un-Organized
Review: I felt the book had highly unorganized content inside the chapters. The examples were vague and confused me further. It's more like a reference book than the text book which would explain the beginner Palm OS programmer the nuts and bolts of palm OS .I read the online docs for palm os4.0 sdk and found them much more informative than the book.
Rating:
Summary: Palm OS Programming: The Developer's Guide
Review: I found this book to be extremely helpful. Well organized, excellent examples, it was a great fit for me. Very helpful for any sort of Palm Programming. Provides motivation for development as well as explanations of benifits of using a Palm and how to program to take advantage of these benifits...
Also, I had a question and emailed the author and heard back in only a few hours - talk about fast response and customer care!
Rating:
Summary: Palm OS Programming: The Developer's Guide
Review: I found this book to be extremely helpful. Well organized, excellent examples, it was a great fit for me. Very helpful for any sort of Palm Programming. Provides motivation for development as well as explanations of benifits of using a Palm and how to program to take advantage of these benifits...
Also, I had a question and emailed the author and heard back in only a few hours - talk about fast response and customer care!
Rating:
Summary: Decent introduction, but a few problems
Review: I have read the author's previous books on Newton programming, so I knew what to expect from this book. I wasn't expecting a combined tutorial/reference that could stand apart from the Palm docs, nor was I expecting it to cover "cool" stuff like writing Hacks for Hackmaster. I mostly got what I expected, which was a good introduction to programming for the Palm platform, with fairly detailed technical introduction and programming hints for the user interface, database management, beaming, find, and a few other basic topics. In a few places, though, the text gets a little hard to follow, and could benefit from a re-edit. Also, the code examples for the book's sample application are frequently presented out of context. You can usually understand how a particular API call is used, but it becomes difficult to see how this code fragment fits into the bigger picture. Finally, for Linux programmers, the accompanying CD contains packages of development software (GCC, PilRC, and associated utilities). However, one of the packages (the prc-tools RPM) was put together badly, and hence if you install the software you get a non-working development environment. Once you do get a working development environment, the sample code needs some tweaking before it will compile - the Makefiles have DOS carriage-returns in it which confuse gmake, and the code examples themselves have mixed case in the #include directives which do not match the actual files on disk. It's obvious the code was developed on Windows, and the Linux side was never tested. I have tweaked, built, and run the sample application from Linux, so it can be made to work - you just have to be a little resourceful. I have to say, though, that I expected better quality control from O'Reilly.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I purchased this book, and after spending a night wading through it, I found myself to be disappointed. It's the first O'R book I've ever bought that I intend to return. The code fragments were all terribly out of context throughout the book. It was difficult to understand where things were supposed to fit together. Variable types were never discussed in detail, form controls that the authors considered 'simple and well documented' were never discussed in the book (never mind the fact that this was supposed to be documentation, eh?). There was no mention of how to pull up date controls like the Datebook does, or how to write HackMaster applets or so on. It was basically just not adaquate for my learning needs. I had a project planned, and the information in this book was not able to help me complete this project.
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