another excellent beginners book by Harris
Let me say first off Im a big fan of Andy Harris's beginning programming books. If I had discovered them back in 2001 when I started programming, I would have saved myself lots of wasted time and anguish. Now for the other posters who are complaining about PocketC being used as framework for Palm programming, let me tell you that there is simply no such thing as a Absolute Beginners book in straight C palm programming just as there is no such thing as "Socket Programming for the Absolute Beginner. The fact that so many commercial palm apps crash should give you a clue that trying to program directly to palm OS memory is not for the novice. Infact I wish Harris would have used an even higher level language of Lua, a very fast scripting language that is ported to palm in the free open source pLua framework which give you full protection layer over the complexity of the OS(maybe next edition Andy).
Everything was as promised!
Everything was as promised! This book is to the point. It may be a little simple for an experienced programmer, but for beginners it is a great resource. The examples are laid out in a fun and informative manner. I'm glad I bought it.
Very much for the beginning Palm Pilot programmer.
This text comes complete with the PocketC Compiler to get you started from the ground up. Very easy reading and progresses nicely. I didn't go far enough to see if the book would guide you through to complete commercially viable applications, however one would probably need to learn a lot more of the C programming language prior to that point.
An excellent beginner's gateway to getting a feel for Palm programming. Very simple to follow.
Should be titled learn PocketC programming
Yes, PocketC is a nice productive development environment for Palm - but it is based on a proprietary hybrid of the C language - and the whole book is centered around this specific development environment - if you think the book will cover standard c/c++ (e.g. using the gnu C++ compiler), you're in for a shock! Also, you have to BUY PocketC after 45 days, because it is shareware - the standard development environment offered by Palm (based on the Eclipse integrated environment & gnu c++) is FREE
Good for beginners, with caveats
PocketC is an excellent programming platform for Palm devices. I have used it to create simple programs, and it turns out, with little more care, can be used to create professional quality programs. This book does not show you how to create professional quality programs with PocketC. However, it is a good book to start if you want to learn programming in your own time.Personally, I find the program samples rather useless, and not at all fun. Perhaps better examples should have been used. Watch out for amateurish code! Plenty of them peppers the examples. Most annoying is rectangles intersection code. The author admits it is faulty, and instead of fixing it, provides excuses for it. Why didn't he ask his smart programmer friend on how to fix it? It's not a hard problem. Some of the slowness of the code may stem from the way CControls works, so you may do better providing your own code. A reading of Algorithm by Robert Sedgewick can prove useful.
Good points: Easy reading, accessible for beginners. Good PocketC packages. STAIR principle.
Bad points: Amateurish code. Lots of space padding pictures. Not all examples are useful program.
