One of the headaches of Symbian OS development is that the SDK documentation tends to be poor. Also, it often takes several tens of lines of code to achieve things that can be done with one line of code on other platforms. Fortunately, the coverage and quality of the Symbian Press books (and more recently the various Wikis) helps to mitigate these problems.

I have recently received two books that have been updated for Symbian OS 9.1/9.2.

Symbian OS C++ for Mobile Phones. Volume 3.

This is significantly larger than Volume 2. It covers just about everything you need to know about programming for the Symbian OS - if only want to buy one book then this is probably it. The table of contents, a sample chapter on Graphics and the source code from the book are available online.

Interestingly, this book also covers the new SQLite-based Symbian SQL RDBMS that’s included in Symbian OS 9.5.

Symbian OS Communications Programming. Second Edition.

This covers both low level technology and higher level APIs that will be of interest to developers. In particular, there are explanations how to use email, SMS messages, the send as API, OBEX, HTTP and OMA device management in your applications. The table of contents and a sample chapter are available online.

Although both these titles suggest that they cover generic Symbian OS programming, the reality is that, over time, there are more and more differences across UIQ and S60. Both these books recognise this and provide S60 and UIQ specific differences and examples.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 10:27 am and is filed under Symbian, Series 60, UIQ, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.