Customer Reviews

Bluetooth Application Programming with the Java APIs Essentials Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking)

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

 

 

Although it doesn't say so on the cover, this is actually a second edition of a book by the same name and the same authors. The first edition was good, but this technology moves quickly and a new edition was needed. There is plenty of practical instruction and lots of helpful figures in the book which, quite honesty, is often lacking in books published by Morgan Kaufmann - they tend to be a bit on the academic side. Plus the book has a website where there is plenty of additional code plus the javex.bluetooth and java.obex packages available for download. Also note that the old edition of the book has about two hundred more pages than this new edition. That's because much of what was previously in the book has been moved to the website, primarily code. The following is the table of contents for the new edition:

Ch 1: Introduction
Ch 2: An Overview of JABWT
Ch 3: High Level Architecture
Ch 4: RFCOMM
Ch 5: OBEX
Ch 6: Device Discovery
Ch 7: Service Discovery
Ch 8: L2CAP
Ch 9: Bluetooth and the Push Registry

Just because some of the chapter titles are the same doesn't mean the content is the same. Everything has been updated and so far it looks like a worthwhile purchase.

The book presents a detailed and insightful look into programming Bluetooth applications in JavaME, with lots of programming examples. I teach a course on mobile and pervasive computing, and this book has been certainly helpful. I have been waiting for such a book - each layer of the protocol stack is considered, and how to program at different layers of the protocol stack is described.

This book is very good. If you are a noob, like me, in Bluetooth programming this book is for you. The authors explains very clearly all the basic concepts of the Bluetooth API. More important for me is that they provide code that run as is, which is more that I can say about other books or about articles I found on internet. With this code I could construct the application I needed.

My only gripe is that the advertised companion site does not have the source code available.

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Edit: the source code is available online in the companion site of the *other* edition.