Beginning Blackberry Development

When Apress asked me to review Beginning Blackberry Development I jumped at the chance, a free opportunity to learn more about Blackberry and their SDK and way of doing things. I also thought this a great chance to open myself to the world of mobile OS comparison, as I have been tinkering with Android over the last few weeks.

The book arrived a few days later, and I dove right in.

Anthony Rizk, the author, kept things in this title really to their roots, beginning. Most pages were covered with larger than needed screenshots of extremely similar screens, which cut down on the amount of space available for extended explanations of why things worked (or didn’t). Something I found to be handy, in the beginning sense, and annoying in an intermediate to advanced programmer.

The book is a quick and easy read, skimming the topics of storage and connectivity. Anthony supplies the book with a few walk through coding examples, but hardly suggests ways to improve upon the skills learned.

Surprisingly the book covers layout and design of the applications quite well, and may be worth picking up if your design skills on Blackberry are slacking.

Anthony does a great job explaining what techniques work on each version of the Blackberry OS, and even expresses why it is sometime advantageous to just drop support for older versions and focus on the future of the OS.

If you are looking to get your feet wet in Blackberry OS development then Beginning Blackberry Development is a great book to start with. It will quickly get you setup with an IDE, and using the shortcuts to coding working examples.

I would have liked to seen the book be a little more in depth, but for beginning it is a great knowledge base for diving into other books like Advanced BlackBerry Development.

Available now at Amazon.com, and Apress.com pick up Beginning BlackBerry Development.

Rob Cavazos

This is Rob, and he has a project right now to sit next to a phone in the middle of nowhere, and take phone calls on a payphone. You can call him anytime using Skype, he’ll be there, because he is camping right next to the phone.

Worried about a language barrier? Don’t be:

I speak German, Spanish and English and have lived in England, Mexico and Germany.

Head on over to http://phoneboxexperiment.com/ and watch the stream. This is the only thing that shocks me about the whole experiment is that the guy is in the middle of nowhere, and has streaming internet access? I don’t know about that, but it all seems legit.

I would suspect this is heavily sponsored by Skype as they pimp it all over the site, and the site is registered to The Viral Factory, so you know it is just an ad. Still neat.