BlackBerry Books

Posted: August 5, 2010 | Categories: BlackBerry

I started BlackBerry Development Fundamentals December 1, 2008 and it was published November 9, 2009. Because my publisher is involved with Safari Books Online, an early draft of my book went online there in June '09 so I felt comfortable saying my book was the 'first' BlackBerry Development book on the market.Craig Johnston published Professional BlackBerry in 2005, but although it was touted as a BlackBerry development book, there really wasn't much 'development' in it.

About the same time BlackBerry Development Fundamentals, my wife found a reference on the Internet for Anthony Rizk's Beginning BlackBerry Development and the race was on to see which book 'published' first. Anthony and I both launched our books at the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Jose in November of 2009 - He gave away a few copies of his book on the last day of the conference and my publisher had 75 copies on hand, setup a booth and had a book signing. It was a lot of fun.

I regularly monitored Amazon to see what other BlackBerry-related books were scheduled to be released and saw that Apress (the publisher of Anthony's book) had several titles in the works. Eventually Wrox got into the game and added their 'Professional Blackberry Java Development by David Williams to the book listing on Amazon. Of course I've read all of the other BlackBerry development books - I've even written reviews of them for Doctor Dobb's Journal (if I can only get them published), so I had to order this one so I could see what I could learn. The book was supposed to be published in February, but never did. Back in May, I received a notification from amazon that they were unable to acquire the book for me. Apparently Wrox isn't getting back into the BlackBerry book market.

BlackBerry Development Fundamentals came out right before RIM finalized Widgets and some other technologies, but since I actually finished the book months before it was published, it was still too beta for me to include in the manuscript. I intended to go back and do an update around Widgets and App World and perhaps with RIM's announcement of BlackBerry Device Software 6.0 I will do some digging and update the book. We'll see.

If you hear of any new BlackBerry books, let me know. I like to read them to see what new things I can learn and ultimately I want to get back to updating my BlackBerry Books web site.  Right now I'm reviewing a new BlackBerry Enterprise Server book for Packt publishing.

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