BlackBerry Development Fundamentals is Addison Wesley's first book on BlackBerry development. With so few BlackBerry development books available, I was excited when this book arrived. Unfortunately, this excitement was short lived.
One of the problems with this book is the content. In this book you will find that some topics such as networking/data transfer (Chapters 2 - 7) are overly covered, while writing a Java application is barely covered (Chapter 11). There needs to be balance and it wasn't in this book.
A large amount of the book (Chapters 2 through 7) are spent discussing the mechanisms used to send data between BlackBerry and your server. These chapters provide very detailed information on this topic including pushing data to your blackberry. Although this is very through, it leaves very little room for other topics in the book.
Chapters 8 through 10 cover writing web browser based applications. Most of Chapters 8 and 9 discuss the limitations and problems with the BlackBerry web browser. This information is valuable, but the tone made me wonder why I would want to write a web application for BlackBerry. Chapter 10 covers testing your web application using the BlackBerry web browser emulator. Unfortunately, most of this chapter is spent on setting up Visual Studio plugin and Eclipse plugin for testing your web application.
Chapter 11 covers developing a BlackBerry application. Most of this chapter covers the specific BlackBerry APIs. Unfortunately, this is the only chapter where there is any coding going on and it is very limited.
Chapter 12 through 15 discuss the ways to develop BlackBerry Java applications. Chapter 13 covers setting up and using the BlackBerry Java Development Environment (JDE). Chapter 14 covers setting up and using the BlackBerry JDE Plugin for Eclipse. Chapter 15 covers using the various tools and simulators.
Chapter 16 covers how to deploy your application and Chapter 17 finishes things off with miscellaneous topics.
By looking at the chapter descriptions listed above you can probably see the next major problem: organization. The organization of the content of the book is terrible. Why would you put the chapters about setting up and using the development tools after the one and only chapter where you write code? This book had 6 editors and it came out horribly organized.
If there was anything valuable to get out of this book, it would be the networking/data transfer information covered in Chapters 2 - 7. Unfortunately, this wouldn't be enough to make me want to buy this book.
BlackBerry Development Fundamentals is available at Amazon.com.
Update: John Wargo, the author of this book, has posted his response to this review below.
1 comments:
I think perhaps you missed the point of the book. It's not supposed to be a book about coding and was never described as such. It's a Fundamentals guide - designed to help a new BlackBerry developer get started with BlackBerry development, understand the components, capabilities, strengths and weaknesses of the platform. Illustrate what you can and cannot do with the platform and the tools that are available to use.
If you dig into the book thinking it's going to teach you everything about how to write applications for the BlackBerry you will be disappointed. However, if you're looking to get started with BlackBerry development and don't know where to start, what the platform can do, what tools are available and how to use those tools then you should find that the book is exactly what it's described to be.
When you finish this book - you'll know everything you need to know for Browser development. If you want to do Java development, then pick up Anthony Rizk's Beginning BlackBerry Development and dig into the nitty gritty of Java development.
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