Book Review: Mobile Devices Programming
Ion Ivan · 2012
Book Review: Mobile Devices Programmingby Paul PocatiluThe book entitled Mobile Devices Programming, pub-lished by ASE Publishing House, is an absolute novelty in the field, being the first material of this kind, published in the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. The book is the result of an intensive research and strong documenta-tion undertaken by the author over several years. Some re-sults were presented at international conferences on applied economic informatics and computer science and were pub-lished in scientific journals. They were appreciated by spe-cialists in the field of mobile applications development.Mobile Devices Programming is a book targeted for master students in the field of Economic Informatics, held within the Faculty of Economic Cybernetics, Statistics and Infor-matics, and also to all those who want to develop applica-tions for mobile devices, knowing their great diversity de-pending on the operating systems.The book includes the practical examples of numerous mobile applications, developed for over six years, and incorporates theoretical contributions and practical experience of the au-thor. Some topics of the chapters of this book where presented to master students during Mo-bile Devices Programming courses and seminars.The mobile applications development, addressed in this book is focused on the many im-portant operating systems and mobile platforms on the market. For each mobile platform are included topics like user interface, data storage, networking, multimedia, sensors, and person-al information management. All topics include examples that were tested on real mobile de-vices and on virtual emulators.The book contains 600 pages and is divided into twelve chapters of which the first is Intro-duction and the last represents Conclusions.The first chapter of the book, entitled Mobile devices hardware characteristics, presents the most significant hardware components of mobile devices, such as processors, storage devices, input and output components. The chapter also highlights the connectivity of mobile devices.In the chapter Operating systems and applications for mobile devices the currently available major mobile operating systems are reviewed. The chapter presents at the end technologies and programming languages used for developing mobile applications for each operating sys-tem.In the third chapter, Java Micro Edition (Java ME), platform specific elements are treated and the programming model for MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) and CLDC (Connect-ed Limited Device Configuration) are presented. MIDlet applications are described and the specific APIs for user interface, persistent data storage, network access, multimedia and games programming are presented. Also, some optional packages that extend the MIDP are highlighted.The chapter entitled Android addresses the programming model specific to mobile applications targeting this platform. In this chapter are described activities, intents, content providers and services. Implementation aspects as user interface, activities, intents, two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphics, persistent data storage (including SQLite databases), content providers, network access, personal information management, multimedia, services, sensors and geographic location are treated. …