Rating: 
Summary: Best of the best
Review: This is definatley the most comprhencive and infomative book about pocket pc out there. Buy this book first, you will not regret it.
Rating:
Summary: Best of the best
Review: This is definatley the most comprhencive and infomative book about pocket pc out there. Buy this book first, you will not regret it.
Rating: 
Summary: and a half. Recommended but most info is available online
Review: Writing a book on the .NETcf is a challenge because there is a wide target audience to pick from...Each group has different needs e.g. introduction to programming for small devices OR to programming against the .NET libraries OR to differences with the desktop version etc. So, inevitably you will belong in one or more of the above categories with corresponding requirements and hence will find redundant info in a book that tries to please all people - such as this book. You will find introductions to the classes of the .NET framework that exist on both desktop and CF. These are very good descriptions and even though there are deeper explanations in other books, here you have the confidence that everything described is applicable without having to check elsewhere for supported classes/methods. If you are very familiar with the desktop version you will be able to skim through a good half of the material in the book just noting the differences. There are areas which are new to the CF or just very different from the desktop and these are covered well, including deployment, infrared comms and SqlServerCe. The winform controls have fewer methods than their desktop counterparts and as such you will have to create custom controls fairly often so the chapter on this subject is very valuable and well written. You will also have to interoperate with native code and the chapter on that is good including an excellent description of the CF-specific MessageWindow component. Two areas are briefly touched upon and deserve much more attention: Targeting both the desktop and compact frameworks from the same projects and COM interoperability. I would have also liked a chapter on performance considerations since, naturally, speed and memory are of particular interest to anybody developing on small devices; a search on the cf newsgroup emphasizes this point. The book ends with a useful appendix listing the framework namespaces and classes with a short description accompanying the ones that are supported on the CF. I am not including a list of the contents here but it is worth going through them to get a fuller picture. They are very accurate as you'd expect from a book that is well written with few if any grammatical/syntactical mistakes (although a couple of harmless factual errors crept in). The .NETcf is in RTM and available through VS 2003 (public release expected end of April 03). It is no surprise that this is the only book on it available now which is why I could have given it 5 stars... However there are no groundbreaking ideas in the book and most info is available on the web...
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