Customer Reviews

Practical Palm Pre WebOS Projects (Beginning)

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

 

 

5 Stars mean: I am very pleased about Zammetti's book. I first bought "the other book" about webos developement and was pretty diappointed. But Zammetti helps a lot getting things working.
When he first starts in 1980 you don't need to be afraid he will be keeping pages filled with letters you didn't ever need to know. He soon comes to his topic and keeps a straight pace up to the end of the book.
After an introduction that gives an overview about the anatomy and the "organs" of a webos application which helps planning the structure of your future project he shows all the most of the inhabitants of the Mojo Framework by a learning by example paradigm. Compared to the other book available the examples seem to be good suited for the purpose of showing the concept proof. They are available on the publishers homepage and:: they work!
He really explaines everything he is doing step by step always distinguishing wether it's a matter of Javascript, of the Mojo Framework, of the program logic etc. so you can always keep track, what the talk is about. This is helpful in particular for developers who are new or not that experienced in the web techniques beeing used (JS, CSS, HTML).
Zammetti obviously - and this is worth being noted - not has just repeated the stuff available over the net - especially in the palm developer center. Where things or better the documentation became obscure he dived into the sample code provided by palm to analyse the function of special structures and openly admitted, when something remaines unclear, and where Palm has to invest some further work to clear things at the documentation. This is obviously something you cannot get over the net in a comparable structured manner.
So I found the book very helpful for starting webos developing, easy to follow reading it.
5 Stars!
Thank you Frank!

I spent 3 days trying to run the first example finally gave up, the book is not up to date with the info found on the web, and above all DON'T BUY THE KINDLE VERSION the list of code printed is too small to read and stays the same no mater what size the fount you use. If I had the paperback version I would give it to anyone that wanted it. I am the webmaster for several web sites and am not a top professional but my customers are happy. The only things I learned were how to put the Palm Pre in developer mode, thats not in the book but it helps you find it and 2 The Mojo thing is a pain to use, I have used PHP and didn't like it either, but was able to get by.

I wanted to like this book. I really need a good Web OS book with examples.

It is very hard to find what you are looking for in this book. The index is not very comprehensive.

Examples/ I was trying to find examples of a dialog box and a timer. There is no reference to either in the index. And since you can't download a copy as a pdf, you can't search the text of the book.

There may be examples of what you need in the book but how to find.....

I have played around with code over the last 20+ years. I finally am ready to create my first app. This book is a great tool to help break the process down to a monkey-see, monkey do process. I highly recommend this book. I like the fact that he provides links to resources that help you along the way.

The beginning of this book consist of a nice overview, summary of API/features as well as useful tips on the tools. The second part goes into projects which are good for learning how things are done. There are examples for using email, GPS, twitters,... I referred to the email service example for work. I felt that looking at real projects is the way to master WebOS programming. However, I prefer the approach in "Palm webOS" by Mitch Allen where he spend more time explaining each common features. This book does not do that very well. Also, the book would be more useful if the index covers the content better.

Alvin