Customer Reviews

Palm OS Programming from the Ground Up: The Accelerated Track for Professional Programmers

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This was the book I was looking for. I didn't need yet another book explaining what an #include is, or how to format an if() statement. If you are an experienced C/C++ programmer interested in programming the Palm OS platform, this could be the book for you as well.

"Palm OS Programming from the Ground Up" goes from implementing a "Hello World" type application through the development of a full-blown Palm OS application. Step-by-step real code examples clearly describe and demonstrate crucial Palm OS functions. The included CodeWarrior Lite has all the tools needed to design, code, compile and run your projects.

And if you do run into any hitches, the author maintains a web site supporting and expanding upon the book, and is very helpful and responsive to emailed questions. Not for the programming novice, but for everyone else, this is the way to get coding in the shortest amount of time.

I found the Dummies book to contain much more detailed info than this book. This book doesn't walk you through using the CodeWarrior IDE at all (unlike Dummies). I bought both books and always seem to go to the Dummies book most of the time (I have the Dummies book tabbed with sections highlighted). The version of the included CodeWarrior Lite seemed more up to date, but I could never compile with it. I switched back to the version of CW Lite I got with Dummies and have been using that (CW for Palm OS is on order for me!).

I also found that this book contained too much code and not much explanation of what it was doing. The Dummies book shows a short snippet of code and explains what it's doing step by step. Also this book doesn't explain how to use the CW IDE very well (I think I already said that). It basically just says, "Make your project and compile it." Hmmm, not much help there.

I'm an experienced C and Java programmer. Mixed experience for 10 years on Unix using gcc and NT using IBM's Visual Age for Java. I've found after two weeks of Palm Programming with the Dummies book, that I can come to this book just to pick up a small nibble of info here and there if I can't find it in Dummies first.

I did find some of the code examples on the CD useful. The Dummies book lacked info on floating point arithimetic. This book didn't explain it well either, but at least it had some code examples to look at for the calculator program code. You pretty much need the full blown CW for PalmOS compiler to debug your code (about $370 when I ordered it). This book contains no Conduit info. Dummies has some limited Conduit coverage.

Overall, I highly recommend the Dummies book. Could ya tell?

I read the Amazon reviews of this book before I purchased it, but I decided to get it anyway after looking at two other books (O'Reilly and ... the green and white one). I figured I could return it if it was as error-ridden and unhelpful as some of the reviewers here would have you believe.

However, I have been pleasantly surprised with it. All modesty aside, I'm pretty good with C/C++, among other languages, so I come from a programming background (this may be the great divide). Consequently, I haven't found the examples to be too far off the mark. The only major discrepancies I've found are something the author, or editor, could not have prevented: a difference in OS versions. - example -> the main include is different for PalmOS 3.5 and the PilotMain() definition is different.

To be fair to the irritated reviewers, the Constructor application (I'm using a full version of Metroworks CodeWarrios 7) required that a few buttons be pushed that the author didn't point out. But again, this may be a difference in versions since Lite (6?) is shipped on the CD and I'm using the full 7.0.

As for the actual content of the book, the author explains the code and includes useful notes and tables throughout the development of sample application. If, and this is a big 'if', you start at the beginning and work your way to the end (i.e. not skipping around too much), you'll find that the tutorial is adequate in 1) explanation and 2) coverage of basics.

I suspect that the following are the most common reasons for being unsuccessful with this book:
o Nil-to-no programming experience (and I'm not talking about Filemaker or QBasic here).
o Attention span of a gnat.
o Lazy (requires complete build instructions from ground up for every code sample in the book, etc.)

To be fair (again), I'd like to reiterate that I'm using the full version of CodeWarrior (v7.0), so the gripes about inconsistency between example and shipped Lite environment may well be warranted. You'll have to determine that for yourself.

Summary: If you have some programming experience, especially with C, and have the time and patience to use the book, you'll find good explanations with supporting code on:
o how to build/install/debug a basic application.
o use many of the UI components.
o use [palmos] databases.
o and exploit a few nifty tricks.

Rating: I haven't finished the book, so I won't give it a 10, but it's a pretty decent book, so I'll say 8 or 9 out of 10. That's an 'A'.

Please before you buy this one, read this... You should know that this book does not come to you without strings attached. Yes, you do get CodeWarrior Lite, but the author fails to tell you that all applications compiled with this "Lite" version will link in a pop-up screen that appears on the palm device everytime your app runs informing the end-user that your application was compiled with CodeWarrior Lite and can not be commercially distributed! So, there you have it... All the examples in the book are built around CodeWarrior for PalmOS, this isn't the authors fault as CodeWarrior is the offical development tool for PalmOS (see this excellent FAQ for more info: http://www.wademan.com/Pilot/Program/FAQ.htm )

I was thinking this would be no big deal, so I downloaded the free GCC compilers and attempted to compile some of the samples with no luck... it appears the resource files used by CodeWarrior are encripted some how, this makes it very hard to port large applications and it hurts this book in it's coverage of Palm development without any investment.

Bottom-line if you buy this book, you'll want (and need) the full version of CodeWarrior which list for around $390. If you don't have this kind of money to invest and plan to use the GCC open-source tools, you should look elsewhere.

The cover claims, "Open This Book as a Novice and Finish It as a Pro". I found it useful, in a very utilitarian sense, because I am a fairly experienced C programmer, but a true novice would be hard-pressed to get anywhere with it. A modest amount of experience with C/C++ is an absolute minimum prerequisite, in my opinion. As mentioned by other reviewers, the title, or at least the cover, should indicate that if you don't plan to use CodeWarrior, you shouldn't bother.

While I was able to work around them, there were a couple of things that I found very frustrating in this book.

Since it was written for Palm OS 3.1, quite a few of the data types used in the example code have been deprecated, and the code will therefore not compile without including PalmCompatibility.h in addition to the normal PalmOS.h. The author now has some information about this on his web site, but it was not available when I first bought the book several months ago. I figured it out, of course, but it was an exercise in frustration.

More troublesome to me is the disjointed, difficult to follow, rambling explanations and not-so-subtle errors in the text and example code. The example code frequently doesn't quite match the explanations. In at least one case (chapter 4), the author could not possibly have tested the code in the listing at the end of the chapter; instead of using a call to the PalmOS library function FldSetTextHandle, he mistakenly typed FrmSetTextHandle, which does not exist in the PalmOS library. In my opinion, failure to test the code destined for publication is unpardonable.

Having said all that, I still found the book useful, as I said at the outset. Perversely, the glaring mistakes actually helped in a way, by forcing me to go to the Palm documentation and header files to figure some things out for myself. Since I was completely new to PalmOS programming, I did learn a great deal in the process of going through this book, although I would have preferred to get there with less heartburn.

*Sigh*. If you've read through other reviews of this book, you'll notice that people either love it or hate it. I hate it. Please give serious consideration to these other reviews that mention typos, bad editing, and buggy code. It's all true. Granted, if you have the patience of a lamb, by all means, go ahead and buy this book...you will get something from it. But all in all, this is not a really good book for a novice.

The book looked quite promising, but when the very first Hello program (using the author's own sourcecode provided on the CD) failed to compile, it became essentially worthless. I'm sure I am not alone with this problem. All my C/C++ experience proved useless in unraveling the mystery of why the CodeWarrior Lite needed to (but couldn't) find "resource.frk/starter.tmp." The main reason I bought the book was to test out the IDE, especially the ability to debug using the Palm Emulator, so basically I wasted my money.

If you love to browse through example source code, you'll love this book. If you like to be given definitions and references, this book lacks in both categories. It fails to provide definitions to many parameters, and only reaches deep enough into explainations to get you through his example application. This example application, a "Contact Manager" is built from the ground-up throughout every chapter. Litterally half the book is source code, the same application, growing bigger and bigger, until you realize that you've just read a chapter devoted to a drop-down control which was only 5 pages long but the whole remainder of the chapter was the enhancement to his application! Most of the book is devoted to showing you how to use any specific control, but it only explains it far enough to work for his application. If you're new to Palm OS programming, this may be a good book to get simply for all the examples, but not if you need detailed technical explainations of functions and paramters.

The idea here is to give solid step-by-step design examples of a simple applications, with the source code in written form and on CD. However what you get are applications riddled with errors, programs that don't work and 3/4 of a book devoted to just the source code. It makes it look like you get a lot for your buck, but alas another programming book to be used as a door stop. I now own 4 Plam programming books all of which don't do the job, but this was the most frustrating.

I bought 4 of the 5 books out there on Palm Programming. I am a seasoned C++/ Database programmer. This was an average book. Most of the benefits I received from this book was learning the IDE using step by step instructions. The sample code was more comprehensive than most of the other books. The thing that stood out the most which was very annoying was that the author did not use a simple data structure to hold the records. O'Reilly Books was the best for this. The O'relly book displayed using a combination of the a Struct and an offsetof macro which made writing the database code much cleaner. The code in this book was cluttered with all of this offset code using #defines and strcpy and strcats. It made the code much harder to read and for the beginning programmer could introduce you to a brut force method of programming a very bad thing.

Overall the examples were ok but with over 50% of the code based on the database a revised version of the code samples using a simple struct and the offset macro would be great. THe other big thing left out was the conduit. There is no sample program to show how to sink your application with a server. on the positive side, if you want alot of content and examples on the GUI development this book was not too bad in this area.