Bluetooth 1.1: Connect Without Cables

I have read some of the other reviews and they seem to complain about the emphasis of this book on the technical details of Bluetooth. It is true that that is the case and for its purpose (i.e. making the Bluetooth specification understandable - some people do want to read about that!!!!) it is a wonderful book.For anyone who has taken a look at the Bluetooth spec, it is a daunting task to read or understand it and this book breaks it down into easy to understand sizeable chunks. It is written by experts in the field and it consistently makes use of diagrams, pictures and bullet points to explain its concepts which makes reading it enjoyable.For readers only interested in only one aspect/layer of Bluetooth, the book can act as a good introduction to that aspect and will at the same time demonstrate how that aspect fits into the big picture. The books has a chapter on almost each and every aspect of Bluetooth from technical details to marketting and branding.I have seen many books on how to develop Bluetooth applications and this is not one of them. That is not its purpose! For its purpose, it is THE BEST book i've seen!

Bluetooth is a really long spec (1000 pages) and the decentralized, spontaneous nature of the networks that it spawns seem very flexible and robust, but at the same time fairly complicated. I come from a pci background and although I'm sure that there is more complicated stuff out there, I would venture to say that bluetooth is one of the more complicated networking spec's you can attempt to learn. However, if the bluetooth market is going to explode to something like $3bn by 2007, then thousands of engineers will have to understand the spec well enough to be able to design with it.There are definitely times during this book (I'm 25% through it now) where I really have no idea what these guys are talking about even after re-reading the paragraph several times. More often than not, it's best to just make a note of it in the margin and come back to it later since the text cross-references and repeats itself comfortably often. But there are also lots of moments when I realize that I wouldn't have a clue if I was trying to understand this directly from the spec.These two authors do a very good job of explaining why things are the way they are. Their writing skills manage to somehow avoid causing confusion and I can understand their state machines and communication diagrams within a few seconds of staring at them. I've found that I can cruise through 30 pages per day comfortably and 60 pages if I put more effort into ignoring the outside world. It's surprisingly easy to motivate myself to pick up the book to start a new chapter because the chapters are laid out such that you are left wondering how the rest of the system fits together. The explanations and acronyms for the most part stick with you as you go through the material. I've found lots of instances where it seems like proof-reading was done with a spell-checker. There are also a couple of numerical mistakes, but nothing that causes confusion.One tip I've found that helps a lot with going through material like this is to have an application in mind and mentally design for it as you read through the book.I highly recommend this as a text for understanding bluetooth, but be prepared to digest it over the course of a two-week vacation.