Palm webOS [ペーパーバック]

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.

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.

This is a classic example of a technical book written by someone who is far too familiar with the subject. The result is a book that leaves out critical information that may be obvious to someone who is already working with the technology daily, but leaves newcomers mystified. I am a 25-year veteran programmer, and I still found myself shaking my head attempting to understand the way some of the things were explained. Worse, it was rushed to market while the SDK was still in development, which means that a large amount of the content in the book is outdated or just plain incorrect. I spent hours trying to figure out why applications I had written wouldn't work, despite having written them to the standards shown in the book.

As mentioned in other reviews here, the book contains excessive amounts of outdated information that has been superseded and made just outright wrong by subsequent revisions to the SDK and other aspects of the OS. Too much of the book focuses on the development of the "News" application that is used as an example throughout, resulting in a narrow scope that misses critical information for developers attempting to write applications for webOS. This is a great book on how to write a News application for webOS, but not so great for learning how to write applications in general.

The reference section is little more than a Javadoc output - it describes the objects and their associated method names, but you are left clueless when attempting to figure out what the methods actually do, or how to implement them.

The last part of the book is a ridiculous 50-page code listing of the News application that had been used as an example throughout. This waste of paper should have been replaced with a single page listing a URL where the code could be downloaded. This would also have allowed them to update the online code example as the SDK was changed, to avoid using outdated and non-functional code as an example.

Overall, while this book was a good "here is webOS, here's a general idea of what you can do with it" type of manual, as the technical manual, tutorial and reference guide it claims to be, it is an utter failure. Not just incomplete with large holes of required information missing, it makes things worse by presenting incorrect and outdated information. As the only book currently available on webOS, it's obviously required reading, but I look forward to more complete and comprehensive books on this technology in the future.