Rating: 
Summary: This one's got some problems...
Review: *Sigh*. If you've read through other reviews of this book, you'll notice that people either love it or hate it. I hate it. Please give serious consideration to these other reviews that mention typos, bad editing, and buggy code. It's all true. Granted, if you have the patience of a lamb, by all means, go ahead and buy this book...you will get something from it. But all in all, this is not a really good book for a novice.
Rating: 
Summary: What this book covers and why
Review: First, thanks for your interest in my book. I hope you will buy it, but even more than that, I hope that it will be useful to you if you do. For that reason I thought it would be a good idea to let you know what I designed the book to do and what it was never intended to do.This book is not meant to teach you C, although, if you have a good book on C, my book could be a good companion for using a Palm device to learn C programming. The Palm OS is considerably easier to learn to program on than Win32 or Mac OS. But if you don't already know C, please don't depend on my book to teach you. Buy a book about C too, such as Teach Yourself C. This book is not meant to rehash what's in the documentation you can get free from Palm (and is included on my CD). I designed my book to get you into the world of Palm OS so that you can find and understand anything else you might need without having to look too much farther than stuff you can get for free. Following this premise, I point you to some good websites in chapter 11 of my book rather than go though that material in the book. My book concentrates on C because it is the most practical language to write Palm OS applications in. Although C++ and Java development are possible on the Palm, they are languages designed for a much, much larger scale of application and memory size than what the Palm OS currently provides. I'm very fond of C++, and highly recommend it for practically any platform other than the Palm OS. You will find some Palm books that basically teach you to use Satellite Forms. Why didn't I do that? Well, first of all, Satellite Forms has good documentation and is quite complete and nice by itself. More importantly though, based on my last communication with the Puma people, Satellite Forms requires you to pay a license fee for every Palm you deploy on, which is not practical for most people or applications. Until Puma changes this I believe Satellite Forms will continue to be of marginal practicality. My book doesn't cover conduits, because in order to explore that subject adequately I would have to assume that you were knowledgeable about Win32 development, C++, and MFC, or try to teach you that stuff. And that's only the Windows side of things, not even counting the Mac or Linux. That's a lot to cover in a few chapters, so I think that would have to mostly be for a different audience. Maybe I will write a book about just conduit development for Win32, Mac OS, and Linux. That would be a whole book in itself. Like all technical books, especially those filled with step-by-step instructions on how to do complicated things, you may get stuck on some strangely worded phrase or outright misleading or inaccurate piece of text. If so, I hope you will ... email me at mykland@mindspring.com before ripping any hair out. With about a week of lag time, I post comments on everything that people have had difficulty with so far in the book. I also continuously add cool stuff to this site as I find it or develop it, so you can expect to find more up there about advanced topics like color, shared libraries, conduits, and so forth, as I post it. Thanks for considering my book! I hope you get where you want to go with Palm OS. -- Robert.
Rating: 
Summary: Not exactly for a novice...
Review: I am now firm in my belief that the editor of this book should be sacked immediately. The general content of the book is, to say the least, wonderful. The first 2/3 of the lessons take you through the process of building a single application, and through this step by step process teaches you the what, how, and why of Palm OS programming in C. The problem is that I don't know if anyone bothered to check the flow of the book, or that there were no strange contradictions. The second chapter starts out simple enough, but when a detailed explaination of the code comes along, variable names are changed... not such a big deal, if you're paying attention. The problems really start in the third chapter where actual CODE is different. An "if" statement becomes a "case" statement (with no "static"), etc.. People who like a book that simply holds their hand and are willing to leave everything up to the author will be no doubt frustrated when countless errors pour out of seemingly flawless programs. (this is the sort of thing an editor is payed for to correct, by the way...) Another huge problem is with CodeWarrior Lite, which comes with the book on the attached CD. It could just be that its a demo version, but there are some serious problems... it might also just be me, but when a program is recompiled after any change whatsoever in the code, big or small, the OLD version (the first version compiled) is the only thing that comes out in the end. This may be a trick Metrowerks threw in to encourage people to buy the full version, but honestly... when you have to recreate the entire project every time you make a minor correction a person starts to get a bit annoyed... The easiest solution here is to simply use GCC, adapting the instructions in the book to the GNU environment and tools. Still, for those who expect something to work only to discover it doesn't (and with no obvious ways to fix or get around the problem that are simple!) the number of people who will continue to trust Metrowerks will no doubt drop. All in all, if you are well versed in C (or even partly) and have a fair amount of programming experience, and lastly are willing to spend the effort it takes to "decrypt" the (unintentional) errors in the book, it is well worth the buy. All the explainations are clear (though vastly incomplete in regards to the nitty-gritty of the system's workings) and give just the right amount of info at the right time. Together with the PalmOS SDK reference (available at Palm's developer sight for nothing) and the Developer's Guide (included with the above document) this provides the needed application phase for learning Palm programming. In short, if you can put up with a few quirks in the book and included software, this is probably one of the best introductions to Palm programming around. Let's just hope they're working on a second edition to correct some of the problems in the first...
Rating: 
Summary: boring boring boring
Review: I borrowed this book from the local library and decided that it was barely worth the effort to carry it back to my car ! This book has the following flaws: Poor editing. Function names change willy nilly from page to page. Boring presentation and style. REAL cheap printing and production. Shame that there arent better books on palm programming.
Rating:
Summary: Focus on Codewarrior and GUI with flawed DB programming
Review: I bought 4 of the 5 books out there on Palm Programming. I am a seasoned C++/ Database programmer. This was an average book. Most of the benefits I received from this book was learning the IDE using step by step instructions. The sample code was more comprehensive than most of the other books. The thing that stood out the most which was very annoying was that the author did not use a simple data structure to hold the records. O'Reilly Books was the best for this. The O'relly book displayed using a combination of the a Struct and an offsetof macro which made writing the database code much cleaner. The code in this book was cluttered with all of this offset code using #defines and strcpy and strcats. It made the code much harder to read and for the beginning programmer could introduce you to a brut force method of programming a very bad thing. Overall the examples were ok but with over 50% of the code based on the database a revised version of the code samples using a simple struct and the offset macro would be great. THe other big thing left out was the conduit. There is no sample program to show how to sink your application with a server. on the positive side, if you want alot of content and examples on the GUI development this book was not too bad in this area.
Rating:
Summary: Not Much Help. Prefer the Dummies Book.
Review: I found the Dummies book to contain much more detailed info than this book. This book doesn't walk you through using the CodeWarrior IDE at all (unlike Dummies). I bought both books and always seem to go to the Dummies book most of the time (I have the Dummies book tabbed with sections highlighted). The version of the included CodeWarrior Lite seemed more up to date, but I could never compile with it. I switched back to the version of CW Lite I got with Dummies and have been using that (CW for Palm OS is on order for me!). I also found that this book contained too much code and not much explanation of what it was doing. The Dummies book shows a short snippet of code and explains what it's doing step by step. Also this book doesn't explain how to use the CW IDE very well (I think I already said that). It basically just says, "Make your project and compile it." Hmmm, not much help there. I'm an experienced C and Java programmer. Mixed experience for 10 years on Unix using gcc and NT using IBM's Visual Age for Java. I've found after two weeks of Palm Programming with the Dummies book, that I can come to this book just to pick up a small nibble of info here and there if I can't find it in Dummies first. I did find some of the code examples on the CD useful. The Dummies book lacked info on floating point arithimetic. This book didn't explain it well either, but at least it had some code examples to look at for the calculator program code. You pretty much need the full blown CW for PalmOS compiler to debug your code (about $370 when I ordered it). This book contains no Conduit info. Dummies has some limited Conduit coverage. Overall, I highly recommend the Dummies book. Could ya tell?
Rating:
Summary: Where is the errata
Review: I have just bought this book. I got trouble running the first "Starter" program. I had searched the publisher's web site but not much info could be found. If you bought this book and got trouble, I would suggest you to go to the author's website..... it can help. It took me 5hours to discover the author's website .... If you are using Visor and have USB cradle only, DO NOT consider using CodeWarrier, cause it only supports serial cradle.
Rating:
Summary: So many pages, so little info
Review: I have some c/c++ programming experience and knew nothing about Palm programming when I opened this book. As other reviewers have stated, the book uses an example program for which the source code is listed for each chapter. This gets pretty big after a few chapters and takes up quite a few pages. While some good basics were taught, many details (especially regarding variables and types used in the example) were left out. I like learning by example but the pages wasted by the listed code could have been better used filling in the details the author neglected to cover. The code in the book was quite buggy which was very annoying and tried my patience. About the only thing that made the book worth it's cost is the CD that contains CodeWarrior Lite and the PalmOS reference and companion. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone except it seems there aren't many better alternatives out there.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book on Palm OS Programming
Review: I have some experience with C++. I felt the sample applications in this book were easier to understand and follow than the more complicated librarian example application in the Palm OS Bible by Glenn Brown (though it is a good book also). Granted this book does have problems with the code, and is based on an older version of Palm, the problems were easily worked through with the Palm provided documentation from the Palm website. One drawback is that the book does focus on using the CodeWarrior product, but again with a little effort, the samples can be easily ported to using the free PRC-Tools/GCC software. Actually if the Palm OS Bible and this book were merged, it would make a really great reference.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of wasted space
Review: I like this book because of it's step by step approach. However the bulk of the book is taken up with source code. Also there is virtually no information on TCP/IP and IR beaming of data. If the source code hard copy was removed it would be half the size. Also there are only a few projects, which are very simple.
| 
