handhelds

I've had the book for a few days, and although I haven't finished it, I have already found enough material to make it more than worth it's price. There is also an accompanying CD-ROM with some complete as well as 'lite' versions of some Palm development tools. The authors suggest this book is for C programmers. I would agree that non C programmers may want to get a second opinion, or see the book for themselves before purchasing it. But I found the book very useful, and I am not a C programmer (I am a programmer in several higher level languages, though). There is coverage of Metrowerks CodeWarrior, Satellite Forms, Linux programming for the palm (with GCC), and of course, the original development platform, the Mac OS. Some topics covered are: Serial communications, TCP/IP communications, Infrared, bar-code reading (for the Symbol. Conduits are given considerable coverage, with an excellent presentation of two-way syncing. The sections I found most helpful were: Designing specifically for the Palm OS; Debugging (especially concerning the use of 'Gremlins'); and the especially thorough coverage of Conduits and two-way syncing. If you would like to do some programming in a language other than C, there is adequate coverage of other options to justify the purchase of this book. If you know you want to program for the Palm OS, but have no idea which programming tool(s) to use, this book is a fine way to help make up your mind. If you plan to write programs in C for the Palm OS, especially with Metrowerks CodeWarrior, this book is what you've been waiting for.

I have read the author's previous books on Newton programming, so I knew what to expect from this book. I wasn't expecting a combined tutorial/reference that could stand apart from the Palm docs, nor was I expecting it to cover "cool" stuff like writing Hacks for Hackmaster.

I mostly got what I expected, which was a good introduction to programming for the Palm platform, with fairly detailed technical introduction and programming hints for the user interface, database management, beaming, find, and a few other basic topics.

In a few places, though, the text gets a little hard to follow, and could benefit from a re-edit. Also, the code examples for the book's sample application are frequently presented out of context. You can usually understand how a particular API call is used, but it becomes difficult to see how this code fragment fits into the bigger picture.

Finally, for Linux programmers, the accompanying CD contains packages of development software (GCC, PilRC, and associated utilities). However, one of the packages (the prc-tools RPM) was put together badly, and hence if you install the software you get a non-working development environment. Once you do get a working development environment, the sample code needs some tweaking before it will compile - the Makefiles have DOS carriage-returns in it which confuse gmake, and the code examples themselves have mixed case in the #include directives which do not match the actual files on disk. It's obvious the code was developed on Windows, and the Linux side was never tested. I have tweaked, built, and run the sample application from Linux, so it can be made to work - you just have to be a little resourceful. I have to say, though, that I expected better quality control from O'Reilly.

The information was not as detailed in some areas as I had hoped. It would be a handy reference guide except! The pages are separating from the binder and I expect that in a few months I will have many lose pages stuffed in the book, Especially in areas I reference often. A good reference book should withstand repeated usage, and this one will not.This book was bought new in mid November and has had just one months useage.