Book Review: Palm webOS (9780596155254): Mitch Allen: Books
Book Review: Palm webOS (9780596155254): Mitch Allen: Books
Too Much Errata,
By J. Mcclelland -
It is a good book, but the errata is just too much. You can’t even get the first few lines of code to work because they won’t fix the file names. Basically, WebOS made an engine change in their file naming schema after the book was published. Therefore the entire book uses naming conventions that won’t work. I’ve spent hours trying to find all the instances of incorrect file name reference to no avail.
Wait for another book to come out or until they fix this one.
Outdated and poorly organized,
By V. Lee -
While this book might suffice as a introduction to the concepts behind webOS, it is neither sufficiently complete nor organized well enough to enable one to create working applications.
Some chapters are written more like a novel than a traditional programming text, with large swaths of unbroken text. It sorely needs many more subject title sub-headers to make it easier to scan, illustrations, and boxed areas highlighting important concepts. Without these, one is forced to read some chapters in their entirety to avoid missing important points.
Even with these changes, however, the book’s writing seems to reflect an author who is perhaps too familiar with the subject matter. Critical knowledge needed to create an application is missing, and the meandering text often references concepts, source files, and tools that are never introduced. Much of the book follows the development of a sample newsreader application, but missing during the discussion are tables of the available functions and features should you want to create an app that does something else.
Also, as a previous reviewer noted, this book was apparently written for a prerelease version of webOS, and some of the system method names and parameters are different from the actual release. Descriptions other critical methods and properties (such as public Scene Controller properties) are missing altogether. The current official SDK from Palm, on which this book is heavily based, has the same problem. Consequently, trying to create a working application is an unnecessarily frustrating process, ultimately requiring examination of the raw source code of the operating system and the built in applications, which is thankfully possible using tools and techniques (sadly) not described in this book.
Lastly, the composition of the book may leave some purchasers unhappy. While important topics (such as detailed use of the standard CSS classes defined by webOS) are intentionally omitted, a full 80 pages are devoted to a reference section duplicated (with errors) from the SDK. Another 50 pages are devoted to a full printout of a sample newsreader application. This space might better have been used for a chapter on tools, CSS, or a more complete index, which currently occupies just a scant 11 pages.
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