PhoneGap Essentials: Building Cross-Platform Mobile Apps
PhoneGap is Adobe’s distribution of the free and open source framework (originally developed by Nitobi) that is now also available from the Apache Foundation as Apache Cordova™. Using PhoneGap, developers can build native mobile apps using standard HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS, and then deploy those apps to every leading mobile platform with little or no recoding. Up to now, though, PhoneGap was lacking complete, practical documentation. PhoneGap Essentials fills that void: It’s the firs
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A good introduction,
When I bought this book, there were no reviews, so I was a little hesitant, but I’m glad I did. Overall, for a first edition, I’d say it rates about 4.5 out of 5. Just so you know where I’m coming from, I’m an experienced developer with about 20 years of experience, the last 10 in web technologies. I wasn’t looking for this book to teach me how to program, or even how to program using web tech, just how best to apply what I already know to the PhoneGap platform.
The book is organized into three sections:
Section 1, about 50 pages, briefly introduces PhoneGap and the general approach used to develop for it. I’d rate this section 3 out of 5. It does a decent job of covering the very basics, but could have gone into a lot more detail on best practices and patterns for different types of apps. Also useful would have been detailed information on the degree of HTML5 support offered by the container on the various platforms, what JavaScript techniques to avoid, what tend to be acceptable sizes for images, js files, audio files, etc. In short, answers to more of the questions a web developer used to developing for a browser will have.
Section 2, about 150 pages, provides detailed instructions for setting up development environments for each platform. Overall, excellent and useful – 5 out of 5. In a couple places, though, it does gloss over things that would be helpful to know. For instance, it mentions Applaud, an Eclipse plugin that “helps simplify PhoneGap development for Android devices.” Simplify how? Is it worth bothering with? This section also covers the PhoneGap Build service.
Section 3, about 150 pages, takes a cookbook approach, covering each of the key functional APIs like camera, contacts, etc. This section is good for use as a reference and provides guidance (keep image quality at or below 50%), as well as sample code. 5 out of 5.
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|A great introduction to PhoneGap,
This book provides an excellent introduction to PhoneGap. I wish I’d had it six months ago.
I’ve been using PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build for several months. PhoneGap works as documented and PhoneGap Build is an excellent service. But if I’d had this book at the start, I could have saved a month of Google searches, hit-and-miss on a dozen websites, and looking at numerous code snippets on Stack Overflow.
The author provides a nice overview of PhoneGap and its history. He illustrates and describes the PhoneGap architecture, how it fits into a mobile application, and how it provides a bridge to native device interfaces. The PhoneGap APIs (and their numerous quirks) are covered in detail. The section on installing and setting up a PhoneGap development environment for each device type is excellent.
I had to chuckle at the characterization, “When a developer see a gap in a product, especially an open source project like PhoneGap, it doesn’t take long before someone builds an enhancement.” That’s not my observation. I think a book like this begs for one more section – an example of writing a simple PhoneGap plugin, for two or more architectures, top to bottom.
I know this is sort of the opposite message of “see how easy it is to use PhoneGap.” But if you are doing a very sophisticated mobile device application, you will quickly see that there are numerous native interfaces, events, etc. NOT currently addressed by PhoneGap. And if you are waiting around for PhoneGap to support W3C DAP Working Group APIs “as they become standardized” you’d better have a lot of patience and something else to do.
With that said, the PhoneGap architecture is still the best approach in this area. It’s standards-based, forward looking, and open source. And I’m sure it will become more robust as more developers contribute plugins back to the open source community.
If you are considering using PhoneGap or simply want to know what it is, this book is a great resource; everything in one place.
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|A book for beginners.,
I really wanted to like this book better, however as a more advanced Javascript, HTML, CSS developer I found the book tedious. The level of detail (click here, type this, right-click there) makes finding the hidden gems (what does/doesn’t work on certain devices, oddities and pitfalls of doing certain things) a real pain. Mostly I would have prefered to see a high level summary at the start of the more detail sections. For example, a statement such as: “In the next 20 pages we are going to download and install Eclipse, build the following directory structure, and create files that can be found on pages…”. Instead one must read through the entire section, which I notice today when I picked up the book again to write this review, is very difficult to re-read (i.e. skim for information you remember reading near another subject, but don’t remember all the details).
The third section discusses all the basic functionality that PhoneGap offers and in places offers some sage advice. But, it’s again hard to find and would have benefited from a lot of “Warning!” and “Note” type call outs making the re-finding of them much easier. Instead it’s organized exactly like the PhoneGap API website and with things changing a much as they are it’s hard to say which is the better resource.
The only great part of the book is the first section where a high level overview of the history, development, building, testing, and general knowledge you can’t find easily on the web are presented. I found this section well organized and it helped me to understand better how PhoneGap is setup to run on all devices it runs on.
Overall, it’s a fine book for the beginner. I read it cover to cover when I first received my copy and full disclosure it was free as long as I agreed to write a review. However, I have not since opened it to reread or for reference. I personally, won’t be using it for my development, but would recommend it for someone who is just starting out with PhoneGap and has basic knowledge of JS/HTML/CSS. I think following along with the book will teach them a lot and get them to the next level where they will find more helpful and up-to-date advice online (once you know how to read through the mountain of bad advice you also find online).
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