Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Palm Programming in 24 Hours

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Technically, this isn't a review. This is a warning about this book: This book only covers general approach to programming on the Palm OS, and then four programming development environments -- Codewarrior from Metrowerks, CASL from Feras Information Technologies, Satellite Forms by Puma Technology, and Visual cBAS Pad (not sure if I have the name right as I don't have the book right in front of me). Now, if you program or plan to program in one of these four platforms, then please look into the book and review it for other people. I know that Codewarrior, Satellite Forms and CASL get good press for being good development tools (Codewarrior, if you didn't know, is the official development platform for the Palm OS).

However, if you are like me and use GCC-based platforms, this book will not help you in the slightest. You may want to ... *shudders* ... look into Palm Programming, The Developer's Guide by Neil Rhodes & Julie McKeehan (published by O'Reilly & Associates ... but you wouldn't know that based on the content of the book) for info on GCC platforms. Personally, I'm waiting for the other two books that are supposed to be published this year on PalmOS programming.

Again, if you are using one of the 4 mentioned development platforms, give this book a chance. However, if you aren't going to use one of those four, save your money because it will tell you nothing.

Unlike the prior reviewer I actually have the book in front of me!

This book was good value for money for me because it introduced me to some programming environments I was unaware of, and I found many useful tips and snippets in the examples.

The book was easy to read, and the examples were easy for me to understand. Having previously read the O'Reilly book I found the sample application in this book to be slightly easier to follow, being more straightforward in it's design.

The content on programming Satellite Forms Extensions and the example were also very valuable to me.

The book does not cover conduit programming in C/C++, however this is a fairly advanced topic that the O'Reilly book does address particularly well.

I would have given it 5 stars if there hadn't been quite so many turns of phrase throughout the book which suggest that Palm programming is as easy as breathing, but I have my life and so it didn't bother me.

In summary, I think the book is a very worthwhile buy for beginning to intermediate programmers.

I am interested in developing executable applications and not runtime interpretted forms. A large part of this book(12 chapters) deals with Satellite Forms and Pendragon Forms, which did not interest me. Also, the chapter on the BASIC interpreter did not interest me. The remaining 11 chapters provide a good introduction to the Palm OS and programming with the C language, but fail to provide an adequate tutorial.

This book fails in its discussion of CodeWarrior. File Menu Options for CodeWarrior are listed and defined, but their uses are never demonstrated. I couldn't get the example application(MusicBox) to work. I received two error messages from CodeWarrior by simply opening the MusicBox project file.

If you are New to Palm development and unfamiliar with CodeWarrior, I recommend that you look elsewhere for an adequate introduction to Palm development.

This book was recommended to me by a fellow Palm enthusiast at a recent Palm user get-together. I'm so pleased with this book that I thought I'd pass on the recommendation. I was looking for a book to give me a better understanding on the Palm and how it ticks. I'm not an engineer by trade, but know enough to be dangerous :-) So I wanted to start writing some simple programs to keep myself amused and off the streets. This book guided me gently into Palm programming by first outlining some of the history of the Palm, and the reasons why certain design decisions were made. The author certainly has a high level of understanding, and obviously researched this book quite well (though the phrasing in spots is a little contrived). I like the coverage of both Satellite Forms and Codewarrior, though felt the token chapter on CBasPad (a BASIC interpretor) could be dropped. All in all I learnt alot about the Palm and how to develop for it, and defintely feel it is worth the money I spent on it.

Chapter 7 (Satellite Forms) was obviously developed with the full version of the code. The demo version (free with book) supports only 4 tables, but the text examples use 5 tables. Chapter 9 doesn't work because the code won't run. Many of the examples don't match what is on the computer screen, so a novice will become very confused. There is an inexcusable lack of "final test" to catch these types of errors.

The Code Warrior (demo software also supplied) chapters talk about development and programming, but debugging is only mentioned. The debugging system doesn't seem to work, and the help files are not included.

I spent significant time documenting chapter 7 "version skew" errors and sent info to Sams, so maybe version 2 will be better. I learned some good overview level stuff, but " . . . where's the beef?" kept coming to mind. I am looking for another reference .

Although this book covers other palm development tools, my main focus was to gain a better understanding of satellite forms and I was not disappointed. The author steps you through every step of application development so you can create your first SF application. There is also an excellent chapter on using the Satellite Forms Activex for syncing your palm data with your desktop. The author is very active on some of the Satellite Forms disccusion forums and has help me and countless others on more advanced issues that are not covered in this book. I can't really comment on some of the other sections, but if you are looking for information Satellite Forms, you won't be disappointed!

I liked the format of this book (as with all the STY in 24 Hours books). The introduction to the Palm platform were interesting and revealed some information that I never really knew before. The book covers Satellite Forms, Codewarrior and Pendragon Forms in detail - with a little teaser at the end for CBasPad (BASIC on the Palm). The author contributes to a number of forums that I'm a member of, which I think is a very good thing. He helped me with a few problems I had getting everything up and running - which was very impressive. I used to think that authors wrote books then skulked away, hiding in the shadows. I'm a bit of a C hacker, so will likely purchase Codewarrior and build my project with that. To sum up, I think this book was a good buy, and has definately helped me on my travels in the Palm Economy.

It tesches you how to program on a Palm in 24 hours. OC, there's no way it can teach you how to really be a programmer and use the Pam as one of the platforms you develop for. But that is implicet in the title of the book.

I used it to learn how to write a little app that I wanted to write. I know much coding in many languages so I was able to take the little peices from the book and make them do what I wanted them to do. For someone who really wants to learn how to program the Palm from scratch it's not a book you would br a programmer after you finished it. It's like an introductory cource on some subject. Start here if you know nothing then move onto books with real "meat" in them.

After I completed the well-informed part of Satellite Forms, I went to the PUMA website for updated information, and was startled at the high price of $795, not mentioned in the book.

On the message board, there were complaints about no support of Access 2000. The new 3.5 version is under pre-beta test only.

Since the trial 3.1 edition is so limited in function, as is the 2.0 supplied with the book, I think all readers should know these situation before they tried this book.

If you're a PC developer, this book is OK for you. If you are a Mac (or UNIX?) based developer, stay away from this book. About 1/2 of the book is dedicated to forms development packages that only work on a PC platform.