Mobile Development News

This may be obvious, but I was rather surprised to see that eBooks are not only pretty common in the wireless space, but they are also significantly cheaper than their paper versions. Some of them are even free.

There are quite a few sites out there that offer free eBooks. This site has a great list of free J2ME eBooks or eChapters... Other not so free eBooks are still often much cheaper than the paper equivalents. For example, Ray Rischpater's book Software Development for the QUALCOMM BREW Platform costs 50% of the list price when purchased as an eBook. Plus, you get the nice searching and cutting and pasting benefits, too! In fact, most of the wireless books by Apress are available in the inexpensive eBook format.

But still, acquiring eBooks might keep your bookshelf nice and neat, but it doesn't stop the fact that in our field, information gets old fast - often by the time the book goes to press, the info is already dated.

O'Reilly, my personal favorite publisher, has a great service called Safari bookshelf that has done a good job trying to address this problem. This is yet another way to manage your book smarts - cause let me tell you, I used to acquire tech books like a madwoman, and now I've got a bunch of outdated stuff I'll never use again gathering dust in my tech library. Safari helps solve this problem - it's kinda like Netflix (if that analogy helps). Basically, they have a huge selection of tech books (not just their own but other big names like Addison-Wesley, Adobe Press, Cisco Press, Java Press, Macromedia Press, Microsoft Press, and Prentice Hall) you can search for concepts, download chapters, and always have the latest info available.