Beginning BlackBerry Development by Anthony Rizk

The first book in Apress’s Blackberry series appeared this past November: Beginning BlackBerry Development by Anthony Rizk. Naturally I picked up a copy because I was curious to see how his approach (and his book) compared to my upcoming book (Learn BlackBerry Games Development, written in cooperation with Andrew Davison). Fortunately, the two books cover quite different subject matter. I’d even say they’re complimentary. It turns out that there’s quite a lot to say about the BlackBerry platform because the application lifecycle/behavior/philosophy is very different from MIDP (even though you can run MIDlets on it), plus BlackBerry has a dedicated server-side network that you can program for. John M. Wargo — who reviewed Rizk’s book on Planet Lotus — says that his book on BlackBerry Development Fundamentals is also complementary with Rizk’s. (It kind of makes me wonder if there’s overlap between my book and John Wargo’s — but I doubt there’s much.)

Rizk’s book — being an intro book — doesn’t assume a high level of Java/programming knowledge. In Chapter 1, he warns the reader that “This book is not an introduction to object-oriented programming, or even to the Java language.” However, if you’ve taken one course in Java programming or have worked through an intro book on the subject, “Beginning BlackBerry Development” would be a fine next step. It covers all of the fundamentals of how to build and deploy a BlackBerry Java application, how the application lifecycle works, how to build a user-interface (and respond to user input), the differences among the four or more different types of data persistence on BlackBerry (and how to use them), the different types of BlackBerry network communications available, and how to program for the GPS.

They timed the book to come out in time for the holidays (as well as for a BlackBerry dev conference), and it’s true that the book would make a good gift for a technophile in your life who’s thinking of going into software engineering or for a software engineer in your life who has a BlackBerry and is thinking of maybe trying to sell an application on BlackBerry App World. (And if they like it — and want to take it to the next level with the techniques for making games on the BlackBerry — well, you can guess which book I’d recommend they try next. 😉 )