Customer Reviews

Beginning J2ME Platform: From Novice to Professional

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

J2ME is a jungle of configurations, profiles, and APIs. A beginner's book might soar over the jungle like an exotic bird, pretty but insubstantial. Such a book would see everything from a 20,000 foot view. You'd see the lay of the land, but wouldn't get your feet wet.

Another approach would be for the authors to grab their machetes and start hacking their way in, following a particular path. You'd get all dirty and sweaty and get a lot of experience, but not necessarily understand exactly how you got there.

This book decidedly takes this latter path. After a brief introductory chapter, it concentrates on the core APIs and the most commonly implemented configuration and device profile. Although there's plenty of practical information on tools and lots of code examples, as a reader unfamiliar with J2ME, and someone who doesn't own a Java-enabled phone, I felt disoriented. As an introduction to J2ME programming, I felt the book was lacking in background and motivations.

Striking a balance between the two approaches I described might be a fool's errand. Therefore you would probably need one book from each category to really get involved in J2ME development.

The title says it all. For someone who has never done J2ME before, this is a great book. It takes you from knowing nothing about j2ME to being able to create a reasonably non-trivial J2ME midlet in short, very readable chapters. It did a good job introducing profiles and configurations and whatnot (Sun's J2ME page always seemed like too much to sort out for a J2ME beginner) and then jumps right into what you need to know for coding. It even does some introductory work on game programming, though realistically you will need a more advanced J2ME game book if this is your intended use of J2ME.

I have always been under the impression that when buying a book of technical nature, one is supposed to purchase a piece of an author's hard-earned, over-the-years experience, otherwise it's just paying for a documentation reprint. Such an experience can be conveyed to a reader in at least two major ways: (1.) a very well-organized, thought-through and consistent presentation of fundamental - yet often complex - concepts (e.g., "Head First Java" by Sierra), or (2.) an in-depth, unique perspective on advanced topics not to be found anywhere else (e.g., "Effective Java" by Bloch). Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this book delivers neither. As an example of the lack of the former: the discussion of J2ME Configurations and Profiles is almost as muddy and inconsequential as the specification site itself. As an example of the lack of the later: the entire Performance Tuning chapter, a subject I would expect to be critical for success with a mobile platform is about 10 pages, entire page -sized screenshots included. Topics such as real-world compatibility of J2ME across different vendors' implementations is almost not mentioned at all. So, what's left? Basically, a few hundred pages of short, introductory chapters on J2ME APIs, reading pretty much just like Sun Developer Network Reference technical articles or implementation-oriented CodeProject pages. Don't get me wrong, the book authors' hard effort is clearly visible, but you can as well google for "J2ME Record Store tutorial", a "J2ME Bluetooth API tutorial" and so on.

If you need a no-nonsense, down-to-earth, non-philosophical guide for how to write Java applications for mobile/cellular phones, this is the best book you can buy today. It's very concrete, with lots of working examples etc, and leaves out the fluffy stuff that's so typical for computer books nowadays. The book is an especially good starting point if you are into applications (communicating or non-communicating), but the APIs for writing games are also covered. I hadn't programmed in Java before (yet C and Visual Basic for many years), but I had no problems developing mobile applications after reading this book. Being such a concentrated book means it also works as a reference for when you need to look things up. All in all, this book is for real developers and strongly recommended.

Yes, the authors say you can use this book to write Java applications for cellphones, PDAs and other mobile gadgets. But realistically, you may want to concentrate on cellphones. That market is [at least] an order of magnitude larger than PDAs or other ilk.

So what does the book give you? Well by now J2ME has been out for several years. Sun has had time to refine it into quite a coherent offering. The book walks through the UI widgets. Much fewer and smaller than the J2SE, naturally, due to the physical constraints of the devices. I'm guessing that you come from programming J2SE. If so, the classes and packages in the book are easy to learn.

The value in the book may be more in the second half. Here, there are chapters on writing a game, using 3D graphics and integrating audio and video. Enough to let you put together a simple game. Albeit nothing too fancy. Perhaps that would be the subject of a later book?

I did not realize this book was published in 2005 (bought it end-2008).

This book focuses on CLDC & MIDP using the lcdui package. Recent cellphones are CDC-based and use a swing subset (which this book does not mention).

Also, understandably, none of the associated (newer) JSRs are covered.

Use this book ONLY if you are coding for older or less capable cellphones or you simply want to code to a least common denominator to run on every cellphone (don't dream of creating any iPhone-killer apps if so).

Even then, you could easily pick up the same info online.

His explanations and examples are clear and easy to understand, although you do need to have knowledge on Java language itself.
I like the structure, but as others pointed out, it does focus strongly to the MIDP protocol and there is more to J2ME.
Looking through the other books I found this the best to get started with J2ME and definitely worth to have it sitting in your shelf when you progam.

I'm still looking for the great book on J2ME, but in the meantime this is better than what was out before. The code samples still dominate and have little commenting to make them clear. But there is better exposition in this book. And the authors give some perspective as to why things work they way they do, and give some best practice style advice, which is appreciated.

Certainly the best J2ME out on the market as of May 2005.

This book is an excellent introduction to the J2ME Platform. It is well written, easy to follow and has excellent examples. This book is a must read for anyone involved in Mobile Platform development.

Never programmed in java beyond the Hello World type application and bought this book. This along with one that covers learning the syntax of java and I have written two useful apps that I have on my phone.

I have something pretty complex as my ultimate goal (although text based - not a game) and feel confident this gives me enough to accomplish that goal.