It is simple to program PDAs

It is a stark measure of how far computers have come that the author reminds us that today's typical PDA has about the same CPU power and 4 times the memory of the first Macintosh, and likewise of a comparable contemporary PC. So while you may be a programmer on a current workstation with heaps more memory and speed than a "constrained" PDA, migrating to it would still mark you as a power developer by the standards of a not so distant past.

If you are already programming in Java for a desktop, then this book will be an easy stroll in the park. The graphics and networking libraries are different from J2SE and J2EE. But this is only insofar as they have necessarily much less functionality, though retaining just enough to hopefully do what you need. Gnash your teeth at the loss of cool graphics, if you must, but that is how things are. The neatest part of the book is the descriptions on how to offload the heavy computations via web services. This may be new to you.

By the way, if you are interested in the book, also check out "MIDP 2.0 Style Guide" by Bloch and Wagner; also published by Addison-Wesley. The two books complement each other. The latter gives a high level description of the appearance and functionality of a UI on a small device. Wilding-McBride's book then shows code examples to actually let you do this, at least for PDAs. Surprisingly, neither book appears to reference the other, though they are by the same publisher and came out just a few months apart. So, at least let me do that for them here.

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