Customer Reviews

Software Development for the QUALCOMM BREW Platform

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

 

 

This book simply rehashes Qualcomm's SDK docs and adds some sloppy example code and some absolutely incorrect statements about BREW. I know people who have contracted work to the author's BREW software company. The company described many technical limitations of BREW, which were later proved simply not true. The company's programmers simply did not understand BREW. This book continues in that tradition.

You are better off sticking with Qualcomm's SDK docs, which are skimpy but more correct and concise than this book. If you really want a gentle intro to BREW, Ralph Barbagallo 's "Wireless Game Development in C/C++ With Brew" is OK, but you will still need Qualcomm's SDK docs.

Rischpater's book is an excellent introduction, reviewing both the existing documentation and the various gotchas you're likely to run into when starting BREW development. He organizes the work by the kinds of things you're likely to do (gui, network, etc.), making it easy to start reading the book, get comfortable with the tools and Ray's style, and then skip to things that relate to the application you're trying to write.

Especially helpful is Ray's inclusion not just of sample code, but of an empty sample application which is powerful enough to be the basis of a complete application. Not simply a "Hello World", I use this starting point now any time I work with BREW, both when trying things out and when actually building a real application.

It's a good complement to Barbagallo's book, especially if you're not writing games. I have both, and look at Rischpater's more often now that I've read both.

This book covered the Qualcom Brew Platform very well and the sequence of steps it takes to develop apps for Qualcom phones very badly. The programming guides were not good enough to take a beginner to the development of even simple applications.

The only positive thing this text did for me was to support the decision to recommend that my company pick another application development platform for their custom mobile apps. If someone wanted to create a development environment to discourage use--this is it!

The book was well worth the money spent to assure me that this was where we didn't want to be. Sometimes knowing what NOT to do is every bit as important as knowing what to do.