Product Description

Have you thought about building games for your cell phone or other wireless devices? Whether you are a first-time wireless Java developer, or an experienced professional— Beginning J2ME, Third Edition brings exciting wireless and mobile Java application development right to your door!

This book will empower you with numerous topics: sound HTTPS support, user interface API enhancements, sound/music API, a Game API, 3D graphics, and Bluetooth. Further, this book is easy to read and includes many practical, hands-on, and ready-to-use code examples. You will not be disappointed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99322 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-25
• Released on: 2009-05-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

About the Author
Bitten by the computer bug in 1978, Sing Li has grown up with the microprocessor revolution. His first PC was a $99 do-it-yourself COSMIC ELF computer with 256 bytes of memory and a 1-bit LED display. For more than two decades, Sing has been a developer, author, consultant, speaker, instructor, and entrepreneur. His wide-ranging experience spans distributed architectures, web application/service systems, computer telephony integration, and embedded systems. Sing has been working with (and writing about) Java, Jini, and JXTA since their very first alpha releases, and is an evangelist of P2P technology and a participant in the JXTA community.

Jonathan Knudsen is a Java developer and noted author of several books, including Wireless Java: Developing with J2ME, Second Edition, Mobile Java, The Unofficial Guide to LEGO MINDSTORMS Robots, Learning Java, and Java 2D Graphics. Jonathan began his object-oriented programming career in Objective-C on the NeXT OS, soon thereafter suffering through a couple of purgatorial years in Microsoft's Visual C++, before graduating to Java in 1996. He has written extensively about Java and LEGO robots, including five books, a monthly online column called "Bite-Size Java," and articles for JavaWorld, EXE, NZZ Folio, and the O'Reilly Network. Jonathan holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Princeton University.

Customer Reviews

Hacking through the jungle
J2ME is a jungle of configurations, profiles, and APIs. A beginner's book might soar over the jungle like an exotic bird, pretty but insubstantial. Such a book would see everything from a 20,000 foot view. You'd see the lay of the land, but wouldn't get your feet wet.

Another approach would be for the authors to grab their machetes and start hacking their way in, following a particular path. You'd get all dirty and sweaty and get a lot of experience, but not necessarily understand exactly how you got there.

This book decidedly takes this latter path. After a brief introductory chapter, it concentrates on the core APIs and the most commonly implemented configuration and device profile. Although there's plenty of practical information on tools and lots of code examples, as a reader unfamiliar with J2ME, and someone who doesn't own a Java-enabled phone, I felt disoriented. As an introduction to J2ME programming, I felt the book was lacking in background and motivations.

Striking a balance between the two approaches I described might be a fool's errand. Therefore you would probably need one book from each category to really get involved in J2ME development.

Delivers what it promises
The title says it all. For someone who has never done J2ME before, this is a great book. It takes you from knowing nothing about j2ME to being able to create a reasonably non-trivial J2ME midlet in short, very readable chapters. It did a good job introducing profiles and configurations and whatnot (Sun's J2ME page always seemed like too much to sort out for a J2ME beginner) and then jumps right into what you need to know for coding. It even does some introductory work on game programming, though realistically you will need a more advanced J2ME game book if this is your intended use of J2ME.

An Honest Effort, but Little Value
I have always been under the impression that when buying a book of technical nature, one is supposed to purchase a piece of an author's hard-earned, over-the-years experience, otherwise it's just paying for a documentation reprint. Such an experience can be conveyed to a reader in at least two major ways: (1.) a very well-organized, thought-through and consistent presentation of fundamental - yet often complex - concepts (e.g., "Head First Java" by Sierra), or (2.) an in-depth, unique perspective on advanced topics not to be found anywhere else (e.g., "Effective Java" by Bloch). Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this book delivers neither. As an example of the lack of the former: the discussion of J2ME Configurations and Profiles is almost as muddy and inconsequential as the specification site itself. As an example of the lack of the later: the entire Performance Tuning chapter, a subject I would expect to be critical for success with a mobile platform is about 10 pages, entire page -sized screenshots included. Topics such as real-world compatibility of J2ME across different vendors' implementations is almost not mentioned at all. So, what's left? Basically, a few hundred pages of short, introductory chapters on J2ME APIs, reading pretty much just like Sun Developer Network Reference technical articles or implementation-oriented CodeProject pages. Don't get me wrong, the book authors' hard effort is clearly visible, but you can as well google for "J2ME Record Store tutorial", a "J2ME Bluetooth API tutorial" and so on.