Customer Reviews

Symbian OS Explained: Effective C++ Programming for Smartphones (Symbian Press)

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As the author of Symbian OS Explained, I'd like to clarify the purpose of the book and explain the rationale behind the example code.

Firstly, yes the book is intended to introduce the concepts of Symbian OS, to an audience who are familiar with the C++ programming language. But it's not an introductory book which walks you through your first "hello world" application, shows you how to use the tools or how to install the SDK. Instead it zooms in on the characteristics of the platform and explains them in detail. It's intended to give an intimate understanding so anyone can use Symbian OS to write code efficiently and effectively. The style of the book is deliberately light-weight so as not to be intimidating to a beginner whilst remaining entertaining and informative to those more experienced. I tried to base it on Scott Meyers "Effective C++" but don't claim to have in any way emulated that magnificent work.

The book deliberately doesn't have a single example which runs through the entire book. I chose to use code (or pseudo-code) snippets that were as short as possible to illustrate a point, rather than introduce accidental complexity by having to explain extraneous points about unrelated code along the way. I think most of the code examples are short and to the point - maybe they just appear longer at first because a new reader has to put in the effort to understand them. I defend the examples as being only as long as necessary to be useful. And, believe me, my copy editor and type setter wouldn't have let me get away with more code than was necessary!

As for what the examples are about, again, that's deliberate. They're not real-world because I wanted to abstract any complexity that arises from mapping a technology to a programming language.

One of the reviewers here quotes the API methods I used for a client-server example. In Symbian OS, a server performs work on its behalf so I chose that it offer clients the 12 Labours of Hercules. The client calls the method appropriate to the Labour they want performed. Sure, it's a step to remember your Greek mythology, but the example is sound. I'm a client, I want a particular task done, I use Hercules to do it. It's hardly a complex example and, if the number of downloads of the example code I've had is anything to go by, has helped a number of Symbian OS developers work through what is recognised to be one of the most difficult programming paradigms for the platform.

Don't take my word for it though, check out the sample chapter on the Symbian web site!

This book is great as a reference to help understand various concepts, code constructs and conventions.
Concise, detailed explanations...also not many screendumps which makes it more compact.

This book does actually explain Symbian OS and its 'special' C++! Not every last detail, of course, but so many of the things that I never completely understood have become clear. There's loads of good stuff on active objects, client-server and cleanup.

This is an excellent book, it does not cover the OS internals or the Symbian architecture, but it explains all Symbian OS idioms very well, there are some technical books that simply putting all the information together and call it a nutshell book, this is not the case, Jo is trying to educate his readers here.

At the end of the book is a very useful internal Symbian Peer Review Checklist.

This book can be used as a good reference but it does not serve the basic purpose.
This book is an introductory level book so assumption is that most of the readers will be new to Symbian Programming. There is notion in the industry that Symbian is a bit tough to follow, particularly to .NET and Java programmers. One of the main reason for that is Poor documenetation from Symbian. So only reference to learn Symbian is books like these and most of them serves the purpose.

The examples used by the author are very complicated, not because of the rules of programming for symbian but because of the examples chosen by the Author. Here are some eg classes and objects
RHerculesSession::CaptureCeryneianHind
RHerculesSession::CleanAugeanStables
RHerculesSession::SlayStympalianBirds
If we can imagie how a program works, then it will be easy to implement( that is the reason why Dietel & Dietel became so famous). If I am a Mathematecian and if I am writing a book on programming doesn't mean the Class examples should be the calculations of most complex equations in Mathematics.

Apart from the examples its a good reference book.