Customer Reviews

Beginning BlackBerry Development (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Since most everything worth programming for is already covered by online tutorials, many available directly from the vendor (for those platforms that have a vendor, anyway), I'm always interested in how programming books stack up against the free material - unfortunately, many don't. I will say that this book, however, is better than the tutorials from Blackberry. Not head and shoulders better, but at least worth the cost of the book and time spent reading it. One thing I really appreciated, that I was never able to find anywhere else, was the chapter on advance UI development. The author discusses how to implement custom widgets, containers and screens - even if you don't expect to find yourself doing any of that, the built-in UI components make a lot more sense once you see how they're developed.

The parts of the API that you're most likely to use were well covered, but that was about it. Some of the more "exotic" and fun stuff like the "Plazmic" media engine, PIM or phone integration, and sound APIs weren't even mentioned. You're expected to know Java cold before starting this book - the author doesn't make any attempt to explain any of the Java features used (even the more arcane features like anonymous inner classes that tend to trip people up). I don't consider that a downside - but beware if you're thinking about reading this book but are still sort of new to Java programming.

This book does a good job explaining the basics of BlackBerry Java development. It's easy to read and discusses plenty of coding examples. It won't make you an expert. But if you're a beginner, it will save you hours of searching the BlackBerry Web site or developer blogs on how to code user interfaces, connect to the Internet, use BlackBerry maps, and other topics.

If you are interested in Blackberry development then this is the book for you. I thoroughly enjoyed the is book. The author takes you through a step-by-step process in creating some basic blackberry apps. Keep in mind that this is a beginners book and doesn't really cover any advanced topics but it does cover the basics to get you started.

BlackBerry phones have been on the market for more than 10 years, but there was NO books on BlackBerry development until now. Simply mind-boggling!
Anyway, Beginning BlackBerry Development has been a pleasant surprise. It's written in a concise and easy to read style. The author introduces the basics for BlackBerry development, as well as the main frameworks/APIs that you will need. It also contains lots of code samples and screen shots.
Chapter 1: general introduction and development environment setup.
Chapter 2: get you started on BlackBerry JDE and Eclipse IDE
Chapter 3: talks about the lifecycle of a BlackBerry application, as well as fundamentals on Application, Events, Threads, and others
Chapter 4: introduction to basic UIs and events handling
Chapter 5: this is my favorite chapter. it talks about how to create custom UI components, something you will need in any BlackBerry applications.
Chapter 6: multiple ways of storing data on BlackBerry phones
Chapter 7: this chapter deals with networking and connections. very important for any apps that needs network access to web services and cloud services.
Chapter 8: another important chapter on GPS and maps. LBS apps are HOT these days :)
Chapter 9: App submission process, very helpful.
Chapter 10: Resources and such.

Overall, this is an essential BlackBerry development book for any new BlackBerry developers and seasoned developers alike. It shows you the door to BB dev in a compact 250-page book.
I also noticed an Advanced BlackBerry development book by Apress, seems like this is the sequel to this book. Will definitely check it out as well. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in BB dev.
Kudos to Anthony Rizk who wrote the 1st BB dev book after all these years;)

I must recommend this book to all the beginners in Blackberry programming with previous experience in any OO programming language. It takes you step-by-step in allthe examples, and eventhough there are some mistakes in a couple of pages, if you are really understanding the logic, you should not have any problem in figure out whats wrong (really minor mistakes).

But why 4 stars? because the lack of information about web services, and the fact that multithreading is just being touched as no major subject.

Greetings and enjoy it...

Beginning Blackberry Development does exactly what you expect it to do; introduce the reader on programming in the Blackberry environment. I have been desktop/web programming my entire career and had absolutely no experience in any mobile app development while beginning this book. I found the book very easy to dive right in and start doing things as it assume the reader has some experience in Java, C/C++, or even C# prior to this.

Each feature is clearly defined as each chapter is clearly defined to get a basic real world, and functional app up and running for Blackberry. There are a few issues though, particularly how it will just provide code snippets for "other" ways to do things, typically they won't even tell you what packages are needed to import and I found myself surfing the web to find the appropriate imports. Nevertheless, it gets the job done. Reading this book makes me want to try to get into an Advanced book in the field.

I am new to Java but found the information in this book easy to understand and it lays a good foundation in Blackberry development.

Pros: The information is well organized. Much of this information is available on the web but the author does a great job putting this information together and presenting it in a cohesive fashion.

Con:
1. The author favors the use of the Eclispe plug-in. It has a lot of great features but you find that the Blackberry JDE works better for the execises in Chap. 4 & 5.

2. Though the purpose of this book is not to teach the Java language, I feel that Chapter 3 could have devoted a few more pages to understanding the API. How the API is structured and how to manipulate it. After all, it is the heart of mastering Blackberry programming. For example, in the book "Blackberry Development Fundamentals" by John Wargo, he does a better job in one chapter explaining the API and provides visual diagrams to facilitate understanding.

3. It doesn't provide some practical topics such as reading text or html files locally from the Blackberry, web signals or push service.

4. I thought it would be a good idea to analyze a Blackberry app like Weatherbug or Youversion and discuss it's implementation.

Overall, this is good book for what it is but you will definitely need other references to fill in the gaps. I hope the next edition of this book contains more "substantial" examples that the reader can use as a basis to build a serious application. You will not be able to code a useful application with this book alone.

In my opinion, I suggest that one should have a good background in Java ME before reading this book. Information on Blackberry Development is still in it's infancy stage with only a few "keepers" of the grail. Frankly, I am suprised that RIM has not fielded a some books on how to program their devices.

Books on IPHONE and Android development outshines anything that I have seen in Blackberry so far..

I really enjoyed the book. I'm still reading, but from all I laid my eyes I can say it is well written and structured.

This book is really useful. I've searched around the web looking for a good beginners blackberry programming book, and couldn't find anything useful until i came across this book. As long as you have Java experience this book is very useful to helping you write programs for the blackberry

Other APress books I have owned with "Beginning" in the title proved useful beyond just being a beginner's learning book (e.g., Beginning Hibernate). This is not one of them, but it's good if you are just getting started with BB development.

BlackBerry application development is a complex maze of new terminology, new concepts, and new tasks that I as a Java developer was totally unfamiliar with. As someone who was thrust headlong into this world, I found the documentation provided by RIM worse than just lacking - it was confusing and frequently totally befuddling, more often than not no help at all. I scoured the internet for resources, and while there are some good forums and blogs, it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus I started looking at books on this subject.

I also own BlackBerry Development Fundamentals which I think is more in-depth but doesn't work as well as a tutorial for beginners. I haven't looked closely at the companion Advanced BlackBerry Development book but in combination with this book it might suffice as an end-to-end nuts and bolts learning experience for the developer who wants to start at the beginning and go as in-depth as possible. It's a shame that the whole BlackBerry development process is this complicated compared to other devices, and it's a shame that no one book really explains it all sufficiently. Still, this is a more than decent starting point for novice BB developers.