Customer Reviews

The Symbian OS Architecture Sourcebook: Design and Evolution of a Mobile Phone OS (Symbian Press)

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

 

 

Is this book worth the investment? The answer really depends on your purpose to read, it's neither a heavy-weight programming book, nor a detailed architectural book in a straight technical sense. Rather it's a book quite loosely organized, and filling with interviews, reflections, stories.

Non of the other Symbian books I read touched the motivation for using C++, the background behind unique Symbian features like active objects, two stage constructions etc. I appreciate more about Ecom and descriptors about finishing the book, worth mentioning is that the interviews with top Symbian figures like Colly Myers, David Wood etc also proved to be very insightful and worth a second read, to give you an idea, here is an except from chapter 3:

/****
Charles Davies:

When I was interviewing people I used an example of a terminal emulation program. Here is a program that indisputably gets events not just from the user. The normal, naïve way of writing an interactive application at that time would be to wait for a keypress, see what keypress it was, and respond to it; was it a function key, was it any other key? You'd have some horrible case statement responding to a keypress. So I would ask, `How would you write an application where you don't know whether your next input is coming through the serial port or from the keypress?' And if they had a good answer to it they got hired, and if they didn't, they didn't.

*****/

The only reason that I did not gave it 5 stars because it barely touches the shortcomings of Symbian's treatment and decisions in the whole sphere of the OS arena, such as the performance tradeoff between microkernel and monolithic.

BTW, this book was written in late 2006 and the latest SOS version at that time was 9.3, the current Symbian OS version I am using is v9.6.

I cannot believe that someone gives a book 1-star rating just because (s)he didn't find the ToC of a book. This is not fair to a decent book. I read this book while completing a research paper on comparison of mobile computing platforms. The chapter that introduces the architecture of Symbian OS and Symbian C++ development framework is very clear and comprehensive. Given the many components of Symbian platform, I would say it's worth reading.

I rate the book as a 5-star one to counteract the first comment. Seriously this is a 4-star book.

Btw: Amazon normally does not put the ToC of a book online. You can search for ToC on the publisher's website.

It should be an expectable book for Symbian fans. but even the table of content is not available online. less than sample chapters.