Sams Teach Yourself Palm Programming in 24 Hours

This book was recommended to me by a fellow Palm enthusiast at a recent Palm user get-together. I'm so pleased with this book that I thought I'd pass on the recommendation. I was looking for a book to give me a better understanding on the Palm and how it ticks. I'm not an engineer by trade, but know enough to be dangerous :-) So I wanted to start writing some simple programs to keep myself amused and off the streets. This book guided me gently into Palm programming by first outlining some of the history of the Palm, and the reasons why certain design decisions were made. The author certainly has a high level of understanding, and obviously researched this book quite well (though the phrasing in spots is a little contrived). I like the coverage of both Satellite Forms and Codewarrior, though felt the token chapter on CBasPad (a BASIC interpretor) could be dropped. All in all I learnt alot about the Palm and how to develop for it, and defintely feel it is worth the money I spent on it.

I liked it. What more can I say. The author has a great, conversational style that made reading this *thick* book a breeze. He obviously understands what it takes to develop Palm software as the text is littered with great tips for first timers. I also like the fact that several development environments were covered, as I initially didn't really know what was available. I've done some C before so I think Codewarrior is for me. Another reviewer mentioned problems building the sample applications - I didn't find this at all, maybe I have a later printing of the book.

I purchased the book specifically for the Satellite Forms portion. I found it very valuable. Well written and clear, and it allowed me to quickly increase my new Satellite Forms skill. I believe it would be just as valuable for someone with no Satellite Forms experience.I really appreciate that the book covers many different development packages - It allows you to look them over and see which is right for you. (the first book I purchased, which I will not name here, focused solely on CodeWarrior and was not very descriptive... since I had no experience with C, I couldn't follow it. )I look forward to reading THIS book's chapters on CodeWarrior when I have time, they look like they will be comprehensible even to a lowly VB programmer like myself.

I liked the format of this book (as with all the STY in 24 Hours books). The introduction to the Palm platform were interesting and revealed some information that I never really knew before. The book covers Satellite Forms, Codewarrior and Pendragon Forms in detail - with a little teaser at the end for CBasPad (BASIC on the Palm). The author contributes to a number of forums that I'm a member of, which I think is a very good thing. He helped me with a few problems I had getting everything up and running - which was very impressive. I used to think that authors wrote books then skulked away, hiding in the shadows. I'm a bit of a C hacker, so will likely purchase Codewarrior and build my project with that. To sum up, I think this book was a good buy, and has definately helped me on my travels in the Palm Economy.

I've purchased a number of STY books in the past and have always found them very helpful. STY Palm Programming was no different. It got me up to speed very quickly, and I especially liked the tone of the text - it was very easy to read and comprehend. The fact that it covered in reasonable detail a number of development environments was welcome as I had no idea initially what was available. I'm a reasonable C programmer so will likely go for Codewarrior - but I like the look of Satellite Forms for prototyping (and the fact that it's extensible with C functions)