Symbian OS C++ for Mobile Phones (Symbian Press)
Book Review posted September 6th, 2007 by eric
 | rating:  asin: 0470066415 binding: Paperback list price: $80.00 USD amazon price: $67.40 USD Target audience: Beginner, Intermediate Buy the book: Amazon US | Amazon UK |
Here is the third volume of Harrison's bestsellers in the Symbian Press Portfolio. This third volume is slightly bigger than earlier volumes and covers more topic.
The book brings you:
- 60 pages of "Getting started" stuff. More an introduction to the book than a real help if you are a complete newbie to Symbian development.
- 180 pages of very good presentation of Symbian basics (error handling, descriptors, active objects, and file system access). These pages are really interesting for most audience. From a beginner that will find neat explanations about this Symbian fundamentals he has no choice but to understand. To the experienced developer that may take advantage reading them to (re)discover some basics (don't expect to find some very advanced/tricky material however as this is not the purpose of this book!).
- An introduction to the application framework and graphical UIs (almost 260 pages) for both UIQ3 and S60 3rd Edition.
- And several smaller chapter on various topics (Symbian Signed and Platform Security, IPC, Emulator and On-Target Debugging, Communications, Multimedia, Databse, Plug-ins).
The book covers almost every topic you need to know to start writing general applications for the Symbian OS platform. So if you need to buy only one book, this is probably the one you are looking for.
The book is not perfect however: it covers many topics but some more specialized book will go further into details. So don't expect advanced coverage on every topics! It has also been written by many authors which makes the style changing from a chapter to another. Not a big deal as you may be more concerned by the technical content....
Re: Symbian OS C++ for Mobile Phones (Symbian Press)
Finally a book that describes descriptors *fully*.
This is the only book that gives a complete explanation and reference for using descriptors.
Not only does it describes all the descriptor types and how to use them etc. but it also describes their internal structure etc. and from that you can understand why certain things with descriptors dont work. For example why passing a base descriptor by value and not by reference won't work.
In addition it has 4 excellent sections that are not documented anywhere else, they are:
1) Correct Use of Descriptors
This lists many do's and don't and gotchas regarding descriptors and is invaluable if you don't want to get burnt
2) Which type of descriptor to use when returning them from a function
If you never really know which descriptor type to return from a function then read this to know and also understand which to use and why (11 different situations are described for returing a different descriptor type)
3) Which type of descriptor to pass as parameter to functions
Describes the different way of passing descriptors as parameters and which you should use in which situation
4) Descriptor operations
This contains a really useful reference section on converting narrow descriptors to wide descriptors and vice versa and strings to descriptors and vice versa and numbers to descriptors and vice versa.
The chapter is a mixture of background, description, explanation and reference. Even if you know everything about descriptors already (but I bet you don't, did you know for example there are two types of TPtr, and I don't mean one being TPtr and the other TPtrC, actually two different types of TPtr, how many of you knew that?) then the reference sections alone are worth having as you can instantly look up things like how to convert from a narrow string to a wide descriptor that and all the other things you can't all memorize.