Palm OS Programming: The Developer's Guide

by Julie McKeehan and Neil Rhodes

With more than 16 million PDAs shipped to date, Palm has defined the market for handhelds, having dominated this class of computing devices ever since it began to outpace competitors six years ago. The company's strength is the Palm OS, and developers loyal to this powerful and versatile operating system have created more than 10,000 applications for it. Devices from Handspring, Sony, Symbol, HandEra, Kyocera, and Samsung now use Palm OS, and the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565928563
• ISBN13: 9781565928565
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 704 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Excellent - Latest Edition will always be on my bookshelf

After dabling with a Palm for awhile, and browsing the 1st ed of this book, I decided to get serious about Palm programming. So I obtained the latest edition, 2nd edition and wondered why there isn't a 3rd edition; as the second edition does not cover higher than Palm OS 4.1.However, given that, I find now that I am reading this 2nd edition from cover to cover. It is truely excellent. Yes there are areas it would be nice to cover in more detail; but there are also specific books such as Palm Database Programming that go into these areas in more depth.I have lectured at college, and am planning to give a semester course in Palm Programming, and I intend to have each of my students buy this book as the major text.I shall always buy the latest most current edition of this for my bookshelf.Excellent work and praise for the two authors! Where is the awaited 3rd edition?

Information from one of the authors

Just in case it's unclear, I'd like to point out that all the code from the book is available from the author's website, ready to be compiled either using CodeWarror for Palm OS on Mac or on Windows,or using PRC-Tools (GCC) on Windows, Unix, or Mac OS X.

Excellent for PalmOS conduit development

Developing a conduit can be as daunting as writing the client application itself. The PalmOS conduit documentation is excellent as a reference and it includes many samples and even a VC++ wizard (if you're a C++ fan), but no hand holding tutorials to walk you through the maze. Neil and Julie's book dedicates 100 pages to the topic (in C nonetheless), starting with a simple installer, then a simple hello world conduit, progressing through one way synchronization, and finally fast and slow two-way synchronization. The pacing, detail, and explanation of the code samples for developing this conduit are perfect, and I was able to start at the beginning and develop my own full-featured conduit in parallel to their example quickly and easily.I'd looked through a half dozen other PalmOS programming books and found almost nothing on conduits. For all other PalmOS development, I can't really comment except to say if the rest of the book is as good as the conduit section, then this should be the only PalmOS book you'll ever need.

Top book for Learning Palm OS Programming.

After using a number of books (from the library) and resources (including the Palm Site) I have found that this is by far the most comprehensive yet concise resource for learning to program the palm, with a nice balance between a tutorial and a reference book. Be warned you should already know C or C++ before atempting to learn Palm OS Programming, life would be just too hard to deal with if you have to learn both together, and this book will not help you learn C/C++.The best feature is that they deal with CodeWarrior and the FREE PRC-Tools (GCC based) equally, as many books don't consider the hobbiest/shareware developers that do not want to invest in the expensive development environments.Good investment, that will save a lot of time it would take to get this information from other sources such as the Palm OS Site.

Great book for the beginner and the advanced

...I've never written a Palm program before, but did with this book by my side. From the step by step installation of the tools necessary to create Palm apps to giving the source code for a fully functioning application the authors have created not only a how-to, but an excellent reference. Definitely a must have.