Palm Programming: The Developer’s Guide

Neil Rhodes, Julie McKeehan9781565925250, 1565925254

PalmPilot’s popularity is growing and with over a million units sold, the Palm OS dominates the hand-held market. Wired has astutely described Palm’s position in a recent article: “On its way to becoming the bestselling hand-held computer of all time, the 3Com PalmPilot has spawned an intense, emotional, and fanatical developer following not seen since the glory days of the Mac. (Wired, 20 Feb. 98). Palm Programming should be eagerly accepted by programmers because the authors worked closely with Palm to ensure that the book is tailored exactly to the needs of the ever-growing group of Palm developers. As nothing but some piecemeal documentation exists currently, this book provides a much needed solution to the Palm developers. In fact, Palm uses this book as their official developer’s guide and will be using it in the future as a key part of their training materials for developers. There are currently no books on Palm programming (and we know of none that are planned). The only way to learn is by using the reference material published by Palm (available freely on their Web site), the tutorial they provide, or various Palm programming FAQs compiled by third parties. Palm Programming shows intermediate to experienced C programmers how to build a Palm application from the ground up. Using an easy-to- understand tutorial approach, this book gives readers everything necessary to create a wide range of Palm applications and conduits, from simple scripts through full-blown applications, and in the process provides thorough coverage of Palm programming. It includes a CD-ROM (Macintosh and Windows compatible) with the full source code to the examples in the book, a trial version of Palm’s Software Development Kit, and third-party developer tools, including Metrowerks’ CodeWarrior Lite programming kit.