Home > Beginning BlackBerry Development
 | Price: $14.52 Manufacturer: Apress  |
Product Description
Are you a Java programmer looking for a new challenge and money-making opportunity? If so, Beginning BlackBerry Development may just be the book for you. This book will teach you everything you need to know to start developing apps that run on the BlackBerry family of devices and smartphones. With over 50 Million BlackBerry devices sold and the launch of the new BlackBerry App World, there has never been a more exciting time to get into BlackBerry application development.
Assuming only some programming background in Java or a similar language, this book starts with the basics, offering step-by-step tutorials that take you through downloading and installing the BlackBerry development environment, creating your first Apps, and exploring the BlackBerry APIs.
You’ll learn how to use the BlackBerry user interface components to create the look and feel you want; how to use networking to create applications that can talk to servers anywhere on the internet; how to manage application lifecycle and data storage; and how to use the GPS and mapping functionality included on many devices to create location-aware applications.
You’ll also learn about the different ways you can package and distribute your apps, from deploying apps on your own website to listing your apps for sale on BlackBerry App World.
What you’ll learn
- Complete BlackBerry native application development
- How to work with the BlackBerry Java Development Environment (JDE) and the JDE Plug-in for Eclipse
- How to debug your apps, and deploy onto real devices
- How to work with networking, GPS and maps, and persistent storage
- How to work with and customize the BlackBerry UI
- Ways to distribute your Apps, from hosting on your own website to listing on BlackBerry App World
Who is this book for
Software developers who have little or no experience with BlackBerry development and are interested in developing native applications or apps for BlackBerry. Ideally, you’ll have some background in Java or a similar language.
Customer Reviews
Good book, but emphasis on the "beginning" partSince most everything worth programming for is already covered by online tutorials, many available directly from the vendor (for those platforms that have a vendor, anyway), I'm always interested in how programming books stack up against the free material - unfortunately, many don't. I will say that this book, however, is better than the tutorials from Blackberry. Not head and shoulders better, but at least worth the cost of the book and time spent reading it. One thing I really appreciated, that I was never able to find anywhere else, was the chapter on advance UI development. The author discusses how to implement custom widgets, containers and screens - even if you don't expect to find yourself doing any of that, the built-in UI components make a lot more sense once you see how they're developed.
The parts of the API that you're most likely to use were well covered, but that was about it. Some of the more "exotic" and fun stuff like the "Plazmic" media engine, PIM or phone integration, and sound APIs weren't even mentioned. You're expected to know Java cold before starting this book - the author doesn't make any attempt to explain any of the Java features used (even the more arcane features like anonymous inner classes that tend to trip people up). I don't consider that a downside - but beware if you're thinking about reading this book but are still sort of new to Java programming.
GREAT book for BlackBerry development beginners
BlackBerry phones have been on the market for more than 10 years, but there was NO books on BlackBerry development until now. Simply mind-boggling!
Anyway, Beginning BlackBerry Development has been a pleasant surprise. It's written in a concise and easy to read style. The author introduces the basics for BlackBerry development, as well as the main frameworks/APIs that you will need. It also contains lots of code samples and screen shots.
Chapter 1: general introduction and development environment setup.
Chapter 2: get you started on BlackBerry JDE and Eclipse IDE
Chapter 3: talks about the lifecycle of a BlackBerry application, as well as fundamentals on Application, Events, Threads, and others
Chapter 4: introduction to basic UIs and events handling
Chapter 5: this is my favorite chapter. it talks about how to create custom UI components, something you will need in any BlackBerry applications.
Chapter 6: multiple ways of storing data on BlackBerry phones
Chapter 7: this chapter deals with networking and connections. very important for any apps that needs network access to web services and cloud services.
Chapter 8: another important chapter on GPS and maps. LBS apps are HOT these days :)
Chapter 9: App submission process, very helpful.
Chapter 10: Resources and such.
Overall, this is an essential BlackBerry development book for any new BlackBerry developers and seasoned developers alike. It shows you the door to BB dev in a compact 250-page book.
I also noticed an Advanced BlackBerry development book by Apress, seems like this is the sequel to this book. Will definitely check it out as well. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in BB dev.
Kudos to Anthony Rizk who wrote the 1st BB dev book after all these years;)
Really nice book for beginners
I must recommend this book to all the beginners in Blackberry programming with previous experience in any OO programming language. It takes you step-by-step in allthe examples, and eventhough there are some mistakes in a couple of pages, if you are really understanding the logic, you should not have any problem in figure out whats wrong (really minor mistakes).
But why 4 stars? because the lack of information about web services, and the fact that multithreading is just being touched as no major subject.
Greetings and enjoy it...
Good For Introduction
Beginning Blackberry Development does exactly what you expect it to do; introduce the reader on programming in the Blackberry environment. I have been desktop/web programming my entire career and had absolutely no experience in any mobile app development while beginning this book. I found the book very easy to dive right in and start doing things as it assume the reader has some experience in Java, C/C++, or even C# prior to this.
Each feature is clearly defined as each chapter is clearly defined to get a basic real world, and functional app up and running for Blackberry. There are a few issues though, particularly how it will just provide code snippets for "other" ways to do things, typically they won't even tell you what packages are needed to import and I found myself surfing the web to find the appropriate imports. Nevertheless, it gets the job done. Reading this book makes me want to try to get into an Advanced book in the field.
Great Beginner Book
If you are interested in Blackberry development then this is the book for you. I thoroughly enjoyed the is book. The author takes you through a step-by-step process in creating some basic blackberry apps. Keep in mind that this is a beginners book and doesn't really cover any advanced topics but it does cover the basics to get you started.
