Customer Reviews

Programming Applications with the Wireless Application Protocol: The Complete Developer's Guide

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

 

 

This had potential to be a useful book, but it is undermined by several serious flaws. First, and perhaps least likely to be noticed, is that it is heavily biased towards the WAP implementation of a single company. While the particular implementation used is not a bad one, the book fails to stress that there are many areas where implementations can differ. A developer relying only on the advice in this book will be in for a rude shock when browsers from other companies are tried.

Secondly, others have commented on the formatting, but the book's lack of organization, unhelpful syntax summaries (including the cryptic "content abbreviations") and the completely inadequate index all add up to a book that is unusable as a reference.

Finally, the book contains far more errors and misleading statements than is acceptable. An exhaustive list would take be far too long to post (and take more time to compile than I care to invest), but just to demonstrate that this is not an empty complaint, let's look at what leaps to the eye between pages 30 and 36. Despite what you read here:

- A nonbreaking space is not a space that can't be removed, it is a space that can't be used as a line break.

- A soft hyphen is not required to be displayed if it falls at the end of a line; user agents can choose to ignore it entirely.

- White space can, in fact, appear between the attribute name, equals sign, and value.

- The quotation marks example has an obvious editing error that means the two paragraphs are not equivalent.

- A WML deck is not conceptually the same as an HTML page; it has no HTML counterpart.

- A WML card does not have to be a SINGLE unit of user interaction, as user agents can render a card as multiple units.

- The XML declaration is invalid.

- A deck can, if needed, possess id and class attributes.

- The discussion of meta information is misleading and promises more than is required by the WML specification.

- The newcontext attribute does not require the device be reset to a known state.

- The card title is not necessarily the default bookmark title, although some user agents may use it as such.

- The statement that visible content must be enclosed in a

element is not completely true.

As a developer of WAP applications, I'm glad to finally see a practical guide on how to build WAP applications. The book covers WML, WMLScript and constructing a Java server for WAP (all with worked out examples). It describes WAP specific technology (graphics, caching, internationalization) and future directions in WAP. The book reflects the author's hands on background as he mentions items to watch out for and how to debug a WAP application. The CD-ROM contains all the examples from the book and phone.com's beta 4.0 SDK. The author is closely aligned with phone.com and the book reflects their viewpoint on WAP and capabilities of their WAP gateway, but it doesn't interfere with the content of the book. The only item to note about the book is that it is based on the capabilities of the phone.com version 4 browser while most of the WAP capable devices currently on the market use the phone.com version 3.x browser, which doesn't fully support WML 1.1 (no WML Script, for example). This book is a "must-have" for every WAP developer!

Save your money. Instead of buying the book, download the UP.SDK 4.0 from phone.com, or the Nokia WAP Toolkit 1.3 from nokia.com, or the Mobile ADK 1.1 from Motorola.com. I'm sure you'll find another WAP SDK at ericsson.com. Read through the various documents and cross-reference the online help. If you buy this book you'll have to do that anyway.

This book is not a tutorial, and it`s certainly not a reference book. It neglects to explain key fundamental concepts, leaving the reader wondering how the pieces tie together. It rushes through WML and WMLS syntax like a bat out of hell and then presents the reader with a "real world application" - a really short chapter dealing with writing a Java Servlet to read a text file.

This book has a number of flaws, the main one of which is that, as a Phone.com product, it makes no attempt to discuss other browsers or the issues inherent in creating content that works across multiple vendors' products. There is also no discussion of WAP security whatsoever, and the WMLScript section contains too much code and too little prose. Even experienced programmers will find it sketchy. The section on Phone.com's proprietary extensions to WML takes up space that could more profitably have been devoted to any of the topics above.

That said, I still recommend it for those working with Phone.com simulators or browsers, and for those trying to get a handle on using Java servlets for generating WML content. It's no godsend for either purpose, but given the near-total absence of other literature on either topic, it's a start.

As developers/service providers of Wireless Business Application Services our group found the book to be very useful in getting newer team members up to speed on WAP programming.

This book offers a clear and thorough introduction to the Wireless Application Protocol and its associated technologies: WML, WMLScript, WBMP images. I found the chapters about building a WAP application especially useful. I recommend this book to anyone thinking about building applications for portable wireless devices.

This book offers a good technical introduction to the WAP protocols and also many many examples of wml and also server side example. Very useful for those trying to understand WAP. You will be motivated to learn more about how HTTP works etc after reading this book. The best thing about the book are the clear technical explanations and examples.

The book was typeset by a amateur! The text flow and formatting are distracting to the reading of the book.

Here are a few characteristics: 1) Inconsistent bottom margins. 2) Too much use of fancy headers. 3) Indiscriminate use of bold font. And many more...

Two aspects of the book that I did not like: - index is horrible; don't buy this book for a quick reference; it sucks - examples don't necessary work on Phone.com UP.Browsers; ie. fieldsets and caching solutions

One strength of the book: it's better than nothing; a bit sad that I still had to surf onto the Phone.com developer forum to get answers.

This is an OK book but is too tied to one brand's technology. I found a much better book that seems to cover wireless web development in general: Rischpater's "Wireless Web Development." That book seems to be more up to date than this book as well.

This is the first book about WAP that I read. To be fair, I have to say that it's a good read for a beginner. It does make the initial learning process easy. However, there are numerous mistakes throughout the book. Any negative point about this book is that it is EXPENSIVE!

For those of you who have more experience in programming, I suggest that you skip this book and read the various FAQs or documentation available on the web instead. The documentation of the Nokia WAP Toolkit is a particularly good example.

I will say that this book actually deserves only 3 stars but given the fact that it's the first WAP book around (where I am concerned), it deserves additional credit for bringing WAP to the masses.