Developing Series 60 Applications: A Guide for Symbian OS C++ Developers (Nokia Mobile Developer Series)

The Developing Series 60 Applications book is the latest book published about Symbian applicaiton development. As you may guess, it has a strong emphasis on the Nokia Series 60 platform. The preface of the book is good summary of what you may get from it:

This book is for anyone who is considering or currently involved in creating software for Series 60 using C++. For software engineers, designers and project managers, it is an in-depth practical guide to Series 60 development. Engineers from a wide range of organizations - independent software vendors, licensees, competence centers, network operators, content providers and so on - should benefit from this work. This book provides an in-depth practical guide to Series 60 software development in C++. We do not attempt to teach C++ or object oriented design; these are essential prerequisites to getting the best from this book. (...)

I fully agree to the above. This book is - from far - the best book available today on Series 60 development. OK, there is not much competition. But it is also a good book. While I have been a little bit disappointed by most Symbian related books, I really like this one. Most of what is written is useful (unlike the Digia book) and well structured (unlike most other Symbian books).

The book structure

The book is separated into 13 chapters that covers most aspect of application development:
  1. Getting Started. This section covers really basic things about Symbian and Series 60 development : SDKs, the development process, using an IDE and the command-line tools, building for the emulator and the target device, using the emulator, deploying to the device.
  2. Development Reference. This chapter goes a little bit deeper into the development process. It will teach you how to play with the HelloWorld GUI and Console applications, how to write a PKG file, hot to generate multi-bitmap files with BMCONV, what are UIDs...
  3. Symbian OS Fundamentals. Probably no need to explain. You will find here all what you need to know about naming conventions, basic types, error and exception handling, two-phase construction, cleanup-stack, descriptors, arrays, active objects, files and streams, client/server architecture. A this step, you already have a good overview of basic Symbian development and can start to play with small console applications.
  4. Application Design. This part will introduce you with the Symbian / Series 60 application architecture: the initialisation of an application, the role of the appUI, the Symbian cotrol-based architecture, view switching, ECOM and internationalization.
  5. Application UI component. A little bit more details on the application framework: creating controls and windows, skins, key and event handling, resource files, menus, panes and softkeys.
  6. Dialogs. An overview of all types of dialogs present in Series 60: standards and custom dialogs, forms, notes, queries, lists.
  7. Lists. 50 pages with nothing but lists and grids. After reading this chapter, you will be an expert on the subject.
  8. Editors. A presentation of all editors in Series 60: plain text, richt text, numeric editors, secret editors, multi-field editors (IP adress, range, time, date...).
  9. Communications Fundamentals. Because you will probably need one of these in your application, the basic stuff you need to know about sockets, TCP/IP, Infrared and Bluetooth.
  10. Advanced Communications Technologies. 50 more pages on HTTP, WAP, messaging (sending SMS and MMS, watching for incoming messages,...) and telephony (making calls, receiving calls,...).
  11. Multimedia: Graphics and Audio. This chapter present an overview of the multimedia framework, with more detailed explanation on basic drawing primitives, fonts and text handling, shapes, bitmap, animations, direct screen accessn image conversion and manipulation.
  12. Using Application Views, Engines and Key Systems APIs. This chapter will show you how to reuse other applications views (phonebook and calendar applications, camera applications,...) and their engines (the camera APIs, the phonebook engine, the calendar engine,...).
  13. Testing and Debugging. Believe it or not, but even this chapter is quite interesting and does not bother you with generalities about how to test your application. You will get overviews of several classes (RTest, RDebug, RFileLogger,...) and macros (__UHEAP_xxx) that helps when debugging applications but also several tips on how to solve several common issues (screen flickering, finding memory leaks, etc...).

Examples

The example applications that are described in the book can be downloaded from the following websites:

  http://www.emccsoft.com/devzone/
  http://www.forum.nokia.com/books/
  http://www.awprofessional.com/nokia/

The examples are provided as three .zip files:
  EMCCSoft_S60_1x.zip - this is the examples for a Series 60 1.x SDK.
  EMCCSoft_S60_1x_cw.zip - this is the examples for a Series 60 1.x CodeWarrior SDK.
  EMCCSoft_S60_2x.zip - this is the examples for a Series 60 2.x SDK.

Each zip should be extracted to the root of the relevant SDK - this will create a directory called <root-of-SDK>\EMCCSoft which will contain the examples in a flat structure. Note that, in order for the relative paths used in the creation of the .sis files to work, the zip must be extracted to the root of the SDK.

EMCCSoft_S60_1x.zip is suitable for Series 60 1.x SDKs designed for use with Borland C++ Builder or Microsoft Visual C++. EMCCSoft_S60_2x.zip is suitable for all Series 60 2.x SDKs.

Conclusion

You probably have already guessed that I really like the book. That's true. And there are several reasons for this:
  take a look at the chapter list, is there anything that you don't need to know ?
  probably no. And each chapter is about 40-60 pages and is filled in with technical stuff with a good level of details. Not just generalities or bla-bla: you will get the information you need on most topics in a few minutes.

What can I add.... hummm. There is one thing that could have been improved, it is the presentation of the code snippets in the book. IMHO, nothing beats the Martin Tasker book on this point.

So, as a conclusion, if you have US$50, £38 or €43 to spend on a book to get valuable information on Symbian and Series 60 application development, this is the one to pickup. And if you cannot afford these, don't forget that we have a three copies to give away for the best contributions written by you on NewLC [1]. Click here for more.

[1] okay, I got four... but I will definitely keep one copy for me...sorry ;-)