Updates
Latest Tweet
What's New?
Check out for latest innovation, a computer based training video collection
Like this Page
Building Tablet PC Applications (Pro-Developer) Review by Stefan Mars
Nice to have read - but a waste of money
This is a fairly nice book to have read as it gives a good overview over the tablet pc as a concept and it's history. It then moves on to introducing the core concepts as Ink, Strokes, recognition and so on and so forth.
The problem with the book is however that it stops there, as the introductionary level. There is nothing here that you could not easily have found out by reading the documentation in the tablet SDK, and while some people (myself included) prefers reading a paper-based book instead of "on the screen" it still has to provide additional material and/or better explanations to make it worthwile to purchase. And as mentioned, this one doesn't.
Everything that is "advanced" about a tablet pc is skipped. Want to custom-draw your own ink? Well, it's covered, just don't expect it to be useful. Want to write your own recognizer, something that would be tremendously useful to a lot of applications? Forget it, it isn't event mentioned apart from pointing you in the direction of the SDK. Speech, that's supposed to be part of the tablet PC? Again, don't bother with this book as speech is only mentioned in passing in the introductionary chapter.
And then you find that that was it. The whole book. So it was a nice read as far as the introductory material goes, but I suspect (and have proof for the last couple of weeks) that this book will only be collecting dust on my shelves in the future. Not worth the money, borrow it from a friend or the local library instead.