Customer Reviews

Pro Smartphone Cross-Platform Development: iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Android Development and Distribution

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I bought this book because I was extremely impressed by the Apress iPhone books. This book is absolutely nothing like them. The layout of the book looks shoddy and rushed. The first page of one chapter appears to be from a wholly different book. Nothing about the presentation inspired much confidence in me.

Then comes the content. The book is short, only around 250 pages. Of this, the first 80 pages are simply a collection of Hello World examples for each platform. The sort of thing you could easily find on the internet with a little googling. The next section is the cross platform frameworks. Rhodes is given 50 pages of solid good coverage. Next comes PhoneGap which gets 20 pages of description. None of that 20 pages is particularly good. It amounts to little more than a brief survey of the material. The biggest disappointment is the Titanium Mobile chapter. It's seven pages long and tells you how to write hello world.

The rest of the book is a description of various JavaScript frameworks that target mobile devices.

This book is amazingly disappointing, and essentially worthless to me. I bought it to learn about cross platform development, and I got a collection of tutorials that I could probably have found with google. None of the code is very good or useful, and the presentation is terrible on top of that. If this book were about $10, it would be a worthwhile buy. $20 might be acceptable if you are also interested in mobile javascript frameworks. Right now Amazon is charging $50, which I would consider theft.

Read the back of the book, then use google to research all its topics. You'll get better material. The book really is that bad.

This book covers a broad range of topics and it has obviously meant a great effort to put all these examples together using so many different tools and devices.
It gives a good overview of native and cross-platform technologies availabe by the time of writing.
Because the book covers so many topics the single platform or framework can only be superficially covered.
If this is to be considered as strengh or weakness of the book depends on the readers expectations.
In my opinion the autors wanted too much. I am in doubt that a developer will ever have the time or resources or interest to try out all the platforms and frameworks mentioned.
An interested developer will always be using only single chapters of the book and will require additional documentation for his or her topic anyway.
So the book makes no sense for developers. For people that have to make framework decisions the book might be more interesting - but from
there point of view there a too many useless screenshots and no real decision memos. The autors avoid taking a clear stand and to give recommendations.