I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but it sounds too much like making excuses. Well, in a way it is.
Faithful readers may have noticed how the frequency of my posts has dropped off rather sharply in the last few months. There are two reasons for this.
First, I’ve started a company called Zeebu Mobile doing - what else? - BlackBerry application development, specifically in educational and early childhood applications. We just released our first product, Baby GO!, which is free and runs on all BlackBerry devices with OS 4.2.0 and higher.
Second, I’ve been writing a book called Beginning BlackBerry Development which will be published (hopefully!) in late October.
No worries about the book - it doesn’t restrict me in any way from posting, except that it’s taking up a lot of my time. I’m still free to write about the topics I cover in the book on this blog.
The really good news for anyone reading this, is there are a couple of new things coming along soon that should result in more posts to the blog in the very near future. So bear with me and stay tuned! Thanks.
-Anthony
5 Responses
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Hi Anthony,
Your new book “Beginning Blackberry Development” is going to be available for purchase on November 13th (great!)
I am new to programming in Java and new to programming for the BlackBerry as well. I do, however, have experience with object oriented programming environments such as Delphi (pascal) and Visual Basic, so I’m not new to programming in general.
I was debating on whether to start out the learning process with the BlackBerry JDE or Eclipse, however I’m now going to start with Eclipse as the BlackBerryCool blog just indicated that a GUI development interface will be coming out for Eclipse in early 2010.
I’m wondering if your book is a good book for me?
Also, I would like to pick up a good book that will help me learn the Java programming language but only if the skills that it teaches are transferable to the BlackBerry Eclipse programming environment–do you have any suggestions?
Thanks!!!!
My new book covers Java application development, which can be done through the standalone JDE or Eclipse - the book talks about both types of tools.
I highly recommend using Eclipse, because the editor, supporting environment, and plug-in support are much better. The new (beta) 1.1 version of the JDE Plug-in for Eclipse has fixed a bunch of shortcomings with the previous versions. The GUI developer will help you build UIs for Java applications, but you still need the basic Java development knowledge. Since it’s so new, no book covers the GUI builder tool yet (maybe in my next edition) but my book will help you with basic application development skills. Also my book is not an intro to the Java programming language, but does walk you through step-by-step a bunch of examples in building BlackBerry applications, so might be appropriate. I would recommend a good general Java programming book too if you haven’t had any experience in it. If you’ve had experience in C# or something like that, you might be ok just to follow along with my book.
Hey Anthony, i just had the fortune to flip through all of this new book of yours for building BlackBerry apps (bought the eversion on Apress), fantastic piece of work! i love how the examples are unassuming and useful. A step-by-step guide to how to build a good BlackBerry / mobile app like this is a great thing! Are you planning to talk about how to incorporate some associated technologies / services into writing advanced apps such as the push data service available for blackberry?
@nox - Thanks for the compliments! There’s another book from Apress called ‘Advanced BlackBerry Development’ coming out very soon (by another author) that may cover some of that. On this blog I’ll certainly continue to talk about more advanced topics - as well as basic topics.
I read your book. It was great.