Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide (Developer's Guides (Osborne)) [Paperback]

Neil Rhodes (Author), Julie McKeehan (Author)

Book Description

Series: Developer's Guides (Osborne) | Publication Date: December 8, 1998

PalmPilot's popularity is growing and with over a million units sold, the Palm OS dominates the hand-held market. Wired has astutely described Palm's position in a recent article: "On its way to becoming the bestselling hand-held computer of all time, the 3Com PalmPilot has spawned an intense, emotional, and fanatical developer following not seen since the glory days of the Mac." (Wired, 20 Feb. 98).

Palm Programming should be eagerly accepted by programmers because the authors worked closely with Palm to ensure that the book is tailored exactly to the needs of the ever-growing group of Palm developers. As nothing but some piecemeal documentation exists currently, this book provides a much needed solution to the Palm developers. In fact, Palm uses this book as their official developer's guide and will be using it in the future as a key part of their training materials for developers.

There are currently no books on Palm programming (and we know of none that are planned). The only way to learn is by using the reference material published by Palm (available freely on their Web site), the tutorial they provide, or various Palm programming FAQs compiled by third parties.

Palm Programming shows intermediate to experienced C programmers how to build a Palm application from the ground up. Using an easy-to- understand tutorial approach, this book gives readers everything necessary to create a wide range of Palm applications and conduits, from simple scripts through full-blown applications, and in the process provides thorough coverage of Palm programming. It includes a CD-ROM (Macintosh and Windows compatible) with the full source code to the examples in the book, a trial version of Palm's Software Development Kit, and third-party developer tools, including Metrowerks' CodeWarrior Lite programming kit.

Outline

Part 1: Overview of Palm OS and devices

Chapter 1: The Palm Solution Chapter 2: Developing for Palm OS Chapter 3: Designing a solution

Part 2: Programming for the handheld

Chapter 4: Structure of an Application Chapter 5: Forms and Form Objects Chapter 6: Databases Chapter 7: Menus Chapter 8: Extras Chapter 9: Communications Chapter 10: Debugging

Part 3: Programming for the desktop: conduits

Chapter 11: Getting started with conduits
Chapter 12: Uploading and Downloading Data Chapter 13: Two-way Syncing Appendix: Where to go from here

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide succeeds in documenting both the elegance and the pitfalls associated with developing software for this handy gadget. The authors are experienced palmtop developers, and their wisdom is evident in the level of detail provided. A comprehensive introduction to the evolution of the device and its systems opens the book, followed by a classic "hello, world" example program.

The complexity continues to increase as the reader is introduced to forms design and handling and Palm Databases interaction (the equivalent of the Windows registry). Rounding out the applications-development tutorials is an excellent discussion of event-driven user interface (UI) programming and the widgets available in the Palm toolbox.

A number of development options and platforms are covered. If you don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars for commercial software, GNU's Not Unix (GNU) tools from the Free Software Foundation are presented as a viable option. The discussion of conduit development is limited to Visual C++, but only because of the limitations of the official Conduit Developers Kit. --Tim Kohn

From the Publisher

Palm OS Programming: The Developer's Guide, Second Edition shows intermediate to experienced C and C++ programmers how to build a Palm application from the ground up. The book follows up the success of our best-selling first edition with expanded coverage of the Palm OS, up to and including the latest version, 4.0. This book will set the standard for the next generation of Palm developers.

Everything you need to write a Palm OS application is here, from user interface design, to coding a handheld application, to writing an associated desktop conduit. All the major development environments are discussed, including commercial products such as Metroworks CodeWarrior, Java-based environments such as Sun KVM and IBM VisualAge Micro Edition, and the Free Software Foundation's PRC-Tools or GCC. The focus, however, is C programming with CodeWarrior and PRC-Tools. New additions to the second edition include:

• A tutorial that takes a C programmer through the installation of necessary tools and the creation of a small handheld application
• A new chapter on memory, with a comprehensive discussion of the Memory Manager APIs
• Greatly expanded discussions of forms, forms objects, and new APIs for the Palm OS
• Updated chapters on conduits that reflect the newer Conduit Development Kit

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 482 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; Pap/Cdr edition (December 8, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565925254
• ISBN-13: 978-1565925250
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,512,425 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

78 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Decent introduction, but a few problems, October 13, 1999

By 

Michael Portuesi (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide (Developer's Guides (Osborne)) (Paperback)

I have read the author's previous books on Newton programming, so I knew what to expect from this book. I wasn't expecting a combined tutorial/reference that could stand apart from the Palm docs, nor was I expecting it to cover "cool" stuff like writing Hacks for Hackmaster.

I mostly got what I expected, which was a good introduction to programming for the Palm platform, with fairly detailed technical introduction and programming hints for the user interface, database management, beaming, find, and a few other basic topics.

In a few places, though, the text gets a little hard to follow, and could benefit from a re-edit. Also, the code examples for the book's sample application are frequently presented out of context. You can usually understand how a particular API call is used, but it becomes difficult to see how this code fragment fits into the bigger picture.

Finally, for Linux programmers, the accompanying CD contains packages of development software (GCC, PilRC, and associated utilities). However, one of the packages (the prc-tools RPM) was put together badly, and hence if you install the software you get a non-working development environment. Once you do get a working development environment, the sample code needs some tweaking before it will compile - the Makefiles have DOS carriage-returns in it which confuse gmake, and the code examples themselves have mixed case in the #include directives which do not match the actual files on disk. It's obvious the code was developed on Windows, and the Linux side was never tested. I have tweaked, built, and run the sample application from Linux, so it can be made to work - you just have to be a little resourceful. I have to say, though, that I expected better quality control from O'Reilly.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Beginner's book in programming., December 11, 1999

By 

D. Robert Velez (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide (Developer's Guides (Osborne)) (Paperback)

After buying a Palm organizer, I knew I had to develop an app for it. This book is not written in such a way to help even a beginner get off the ground. Although it talks about different environments and other software to use, there is no clear thought and organization. The author does stress on good programming design and development, but thats about it. I'm sort of diappointed in this title, especially since its an O'Reilly book. Skip this one and find another Palm programming book!

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Don't bother -- the DOCS available at Palm, Inc. are better, November 15, 2000

By 

J. D. Shaffer (Shimane, Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide (Developer's Guides (Osborne)) (Paperback)

I read the SDK documentation and the SDK Companion before Iever bought this book. I thought it would help clarify some of themore difficult points (as I come from a weak programming background.)But instead, I found that I already know MORE than this book teaches.Many of the examples are pseudo-code, worthless as real examples, andbarely helpful for the calls they make. The authors often gloss overthe more important points like common use, syntax, and definitions;telling the reader to read the SDK documents for THOSE things. Well,if I can read the SDK for everything important, than why do I need thebook? To summarize, it's not worth the money...