Customer Reviews

Mobile .NET

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

 

 

This book is worthless. As a .NET developer, I was expecting it to be a book on the .NET Mobile API, and catered to those developing .NET for the mobile community. NOTHING in this book that you cannot pick up in the QuickStarts. Nothing. It contains so little information that like one of the other reviewer, I'm ashamed I bought it too. Don't waste your time or money on this book unless you only want to have a high level intro on mobile devices and little sample code on how to do them in VB.NET - YUCK!

This book is simple garbage. Ferguson is ignorant of very basics of technology he laborously attempts to write about. This book contains severe factual errors. for example in Ferguson view main difference between Java and .NET is: "Java is Sun technology for 'write once, run anywhere'. With .NET however...The CLR runs on a Windows server - not on the client devices! ... .NET means 'write once, adopt on the server, receive anywhere'." This got to be a joke...Rest of the book is no structure, no real contect - just chaotic collection of topics (mostly in pictures) somehow realted to mobile space. I'm surprised APress agreed to print this drivel - it woudn't pass juniour .NET engineer technical review.

The book series by APress is called "Expert's Voice". Well this author uses the same old StockQuote example. It is impossible to view this book as an Experts Voice when the same old lame code examples are re-used or the code itself is just junior. The cover states "Master the Mobile Internet Toolkit" yet there is little coverage. There is NOTHING in this book that you cannot pick up in the QuickStarts. Nothing. It contains so little information that I'm ashamed I even bought it. Let's face it, Apress really knows how to use whitespace and fonts to fill up pages!

Save your money.

I bought this book at the PDC in LA just a few weeks ago. At the PDC, the .NETcf (compact framework) was released, and this book covered the process of building .NET apps that run on various PDAs. Within miniutes, I was able to build a C# app for my HP handheld. The book talks about lots of other cool topics. For example, there is coverage on how to get .NET apps to run on Palms, cell phones and even interact with J2ME clients (using web services / XML).

All in all this is a very solid book on building mobile apps using .NET. (...) ...I for one found a ton of information that was no where in the supplied docs.

What a great book! I'd been hearing so much about wireless development and .NET that I really wanted to start learning about both of them. I've been programming in Visual Basic for a few years now, so I was pleased to find that this book seemed to assume a level of experience fairly close to my own.

The first half of the book tells you all about different kinds of wireless devices -- which was great, since I was only familiar with my own Nokia cell phone. The second half of the book tells you all about the different .NET technologies that you can use with these devices.

After reading this book, I was able to create a full WAP-based hour-tracking application for my personal use in just one evening. That alone paid for the book!

I recommend this book highly. It has a proper introduction for .NET devices and application development. This is the exact book that I was looking for.