Originally posted by Christophe Lee:
How is Wrox's Professional Java Mobile Programming?
I've heard mixed reviews on it. (actually, there were only 3 reviews on amazon and one was bad. but the same reviewer gave Yu Feng's J2ME book full marks, so could just be sabotage?).
As one of the authors, I noticed that review. It was critical of the fact that there was no coverage of the MIDP for Palm. In fact, there is coverage, but only one page - the reason being that there's not a lot to say about MIDP for Palm! It works, just like any other MIDP implementation (bugs aside), so there didn't seem much point in laburing over it, other than a description of how to run a simple MIDP application.
(If anyone wants to see more than that, then do tell me! Maybe there's something obvious that I haven't seen...)
The other criticism was that it was too simple. This is partly valid, but when you're faced with a new technology, as J2ME is, you cannot afford to ignore basic introductions - that would be unacceptable. As for the complex stuff, I think there's some good stuff on JMS, hooking into
servlets, RMI (and pseudo-RMI), security, synchronisation, and so on, so I fell the criticism was a little harsh.
As an aside, if you compare it to Wrox's Professional WAP book, I believe its pitched at the same level, with a mix of introductory and advanced chapters, and that got excellent reviews. Oh, well, you can't please everyone - but we try our best :-)
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Richard Taylor
Author of
Professional Java Mobile Programming