Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Wireless Java with J2ME in 21 Days

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

 

 

Very good tutorial text ... with a nice hands-on approach
and a working example on every chapter. Strongly recommended as your first book on J2ME. Simple graphical interfaces, persistent storage, connecting to the internet, personal information management..and even a few chapters on game development, which is great since , honestly speaking, is there any of us who wants to use Java on cell phones to make boring contact managment programs?

I knew a little bit of Java, and I found this book very good. J2ME is explained pretty good, and the examples are easy to follow. I have developed several applications that I use after reading this book.
If there is anything that is missing in this book, it would probably be an Appendix with a better description of the different APIs.
It is a very good book for anyone that wants to learn J2ME, but might be a little boring if you already have J2ME experience. However, if you buy a "Teach Yourself .... in 21 days" book, you are probably not an experienced programmer in the language anyway.

Bad news first: This book has a few typographical errors in the
explanatory texts but none in the source code listings. It also
has a few misplaced words reversing the meaning of what the
author intended to say. But if you're a beginning Java
programmer and understands basic code optimization, you'll find
yourself correcting the texts with a note on the margins.
Example: on page 273, "... it takes longer for MIDlet code to
access local variables than ... member variables..." The "local"
and "member" words should be interchanged.

I had to re-read Chapter 17 "Creating Animated MIDlets" because
the author uses a different Sprite / Sprite Management classes
that I'm used to (I write my own). Chapter 19 is probably the
most difficult chapter to read because it uses artificial
algorithms without fully explaining them (in fairness to the
author, he did mention the names of the original algorithm
developers, the general term of the algorithm and one possible
source for AI research).

The author could have used this chapter to create a multiplayer
game (as a perfect combination of his prevous game programming
chapters and networking-I/O chapters). Example: A two-player
first person turn-based boxing game could have been a good
tutorial.

Also, the last two chapters were not necessary. He could have
put them in appendices. The space could have been used too for
more complicated examples.

Good news: Nevertheless, Chapters 1 to 16 were an excellent
J2ME tutorial altogeter. The author wrote very clearly and he
reinforces previous lessons implicitly. As this is not a game
programming book and despite the minor issues above, this books
served its purpose of teaching me J2ME in 5 days (not 21 sorry).

As one of many people now moving their programming to the wireless world of Java 2 Micro Edition, I found this book to be excellent.

It contains numerous, real world examples - from getting simple text off a server, right through to reasonably complex game design and even sprite manipulation.

In fact I'm sure many of the applications in this book will be converted into real world code by cut and paste coders!

The book does require some limited knowledge of Java2 but I was at home very quickly.

With plenty of exercises, and a CD of all the source and latest Sun Forte/SDK I was delighted with my purchase.

Perfect if you're targeting Motorola cellphones or Palm development (note though doesn't cover the new Nokia J2ME SDK)