Advanced Palm Programming: Developing Real-World Applications (With CD-ROM) [Paperback]

Philip Rowe (Author), Ray Rischpater (Author), Steve Mann (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471390879 | ISBN-13: 978-0471390879 | Publication Date: January 15, 2000

Graduate to the next level of Palm programming

Advanced Palm(TM) Programming Professional Developer's Guide

If you've been looking for an expert guide to Palm programming that goes beyond the basics, here it is. This book shows you how to create real-world applications that will put you at the forefront of development for the most rapidly growing OS in handheld computing. Pioneering Palm software developers Mann and Rischpater walk you through the source code for their programming examples, teaching you both about algorithms that solve problems specific to the Palm OS and more general purpose application-level programs. In stand-alone chapters designed for easy reference, they provide:
* A practical modest-precision trigonometric library
* Routines for floating-point data entry, formatting, and conversion
* An application to create Palm database (PDB) files on the desktop
* Map display applications with rich graphics support
* Simple yet powerful global searching techniques for Palm devices
* Guidance for building a transport-independent communications API
* Solutions for quickly accessing records in large databases
* Debugging techniques for the Palm OS

The CD-ROM contains complete source code for all the programming samples in the book.

Professional Developer's Guides The Professional Developer's Guide series provides the first in-depth look at recent or emerging programming technologies. Experienced programmers and developers will find comprehensive coverage of new programming standards as well as code, sample programs, developer's tools, and applications that will make learning a new programming language much easier.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Graduate to the next level of Palm programming

Advanced Palm(TM) Programming Professional Developer's Guide

If you've been looking for an expert guide to Palm programming that goes beyond the basics, here it is. This book shows you how to create real-world applications that will put you at the forefront of development for the most rapidly growing OS in handheld computing. Pioneering Palm software developers Mann and Rischpater walk you through the source code for their programming examples, teaching you both about algorithms that solve problems specific to the Palm OS and more general purpose application-level programs. In stand-alone chapters designed for easy reference, they provide:
* A practical modest-precision trigonometric library
* Routines for floating-point data entry, formatting, and conversion
* An application to create Palm database (PDB) files on the desktop
* Map display applications with rich graphics support
* Simple yet powerful global searching techniques for Palm devices
* Guidance for building a transport-independent communications API
* Solutions for quickly accessing records in large databases
* Debugging techniques for the Palm OS

The CD-ROM contains complete source code for all the programming samples in the book.

Professional Developer's Guides The Professional Developer's Guide series provides the first in-depth look at recent or emerging programming technologies. Experienced programmers and developers will find comprehensive coverage of new programming standards as well as code, sample programs, developer's tools, and applications that will make learning a new programming language much easier.

About the Author

STEVE MANN, bestselling author of Programming Applications with WAP (Wiley), is President of Creative Digital Publishing, a leading provider of technical information and software for the handheld and mobile computing industries. Mann released the first freeware application for Palm and is the creator of the most widely distributed Palm travel application, WorldFAQ .(TM) He is also the former publisher and editor of Handheld Systems magazine. RAY RISCHPATER is a consultant and writer formerly at Sun and Spyglass who participated in the development of Internet technologies for the Palm OS and other handheld devices. Rischpater has written for such publications as Handheld Systems, CQ VHF, and Apple's Develop.

Product Details

• Paperback: 381 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (January 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471390879
• ISBN-13: 978-0471390879
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,208,603 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Buffet for the Advanced Developer, January 22, 2001

By 

"myam" (Yonkers, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Advanced Palm Programming: Developing Real-World Applications (With CD-ROM) (Paperback)

Frequent questions I encounter while developing for the Palm platform include, how do I work with floating point numbers? How do I do graphics? How do I add an appointment or address book entry into the Palm database? If you've gone past the basics of Palm programming and have these kinds of questions, "Advanced Palm Programming" is for you.

For example, when I wrote a calculator program, I wish I had the chapter on floating point conversion and formatting. The PalmOS is designed to be compact and efficient and therefore, doesn't support floating point very well. Mann and Rischpater present routines with 15 digit precision, localization, and left and right alignment.

Regarding graphics, the authors discuss bitmaps, and panning and zooming techniques. If you're looking for sample video games, you'll have to look elsewhere. The authors frame their discussion with mapping software.

The chapter on reading from and writing to Palm's native databases (address, datebook, todo, memo) is interesting. While some developers have done this by studying Palm's source code (like myself), the authors offer an alternative API they call a property interface. This API hides the internal details, simplifies the task, and generally saves time. If Palm changes the underlying database schema, the API will isolate those changes and prevent your code from breaking. But you will have to depend on the authors to update their API, or know enough of the internals to update it yourself. I haven't worked with the API enough to render a verdict. There is one other way to write to Palm's address, datebook, and todo database that the authors did not mention: use the vCalendar and vCard format. These public formats, however, are no help when it comes to reading the databases.

The book covers many other advanced topics so be sure to check out the table of contents. Most of the examples require Palm OS 3.1, Codewarrior 6, and the Palm SDK 3.5. Unix and the gcc toolchain are not used in this book. Nevertheless, the writing is clear, as are the examples, so developers on Unix can still benefit.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What you can do after you do "Hello World", November 3, 2000

By 

J. Powers - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Advanced Palm Programming: Developing Real-World Applications (With CD-ROM) (Paperback)

This book puts meat on the bones of the Palm OS. The topics cover the standard Palm OS information and put it in the context of practical applications. It goes well beyond the "Hello World" basics and delves into issues that the experienced Palm programmer needs to know. For example, the book includes a section on progress dialogs in the context of a sample application. It explains how to use the Palm OS Progress Manager and gives sample code. But, and here where the book really shines, it points out the weaknesses in the Palm implementation (works only with Palm OS 3.0 or newer, etc.) and offers a much better alternative, again with sample code. An experienced programmer can copy and paste the code to implement advanced Palm OS functions in hours rather than days.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The book you were looking for..., December 9, 2000

By 

"[e-mail]" (Berlin, Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Advanced Palm Programming: Developing Real-World Applications (With CD-ROM) (Paperback)

Being disappointed from "Palm Database Programming" und "Palm Programming - the developer's guide" which were all useful at the beginning but very fast became extremely superficial (Half of Palm database programming describes the use of Satellite forms and the configuration of SQL!!) I discovered that this book really rocks.

It helps you with the solutions to concrete real world problems you encounter and guides you around mistakes every programmer made at some time ;)

It has not only complete, easily readable sourcecode but also describes the structuring of an application for a certain task from the abstract problem up - and this for every single chapter. That is, you have 8 completely functioning applications and not only 8 stages of one boring one (as in O'reilly's ;).

Extremely helpful was the java application to build Palm databases on the desktop which saved me a lot of time.

If you know the API already and C is your language - this book is for you.