Amazon.co.uk: J2ME Games with MIDP2: Pt. 2 (Expert's Voice): Carol Hamer: Books

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Product Description

Book Description
Java 2ME (Micro Edition) is the client-side Java development platform for building wireless Java-based cell phone and PDA applications. This book specifically addresses the challenge and fun of building game applications for these kinds of portable devices. Hamer shows you how to use J2ME for developing wireless phone and PDA game applications using the latest MIDP 2 specification.

New to developing with J2ME? First, read Jonathan Knudsen’s Wireless Java: Developing with J2ME, Second Edition, then this book, and follow it up with David Croft’s Advanced Java Game Programming, for a complete Jave game developer’s experience from Apress.

Synopsis
Java 2 ME (Micro Edition) is the client-side Java development platform for building wireless Java-based cell phone and PDA applications. This book addresses the fun challenge of building game applications for these kinds of portable devices. Author Carol Hamer shows you how to use J2ME for developing, using the latest MIDP 2.0 specification. If you are new to developing with J2ME, we recommend you first read Jonathan Knudsen's Wireless Java: Developing with J2ME, Second Edition. We suggest that you read this book second, then complete the "series" with David Croft's Advanced Java Game Programming, for a comprehensive Apress experience of game developing with Java.

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

Brings the fun back to Java, 29 Oct 2004

By	Thomas Paul (Plainview, NY USA) - See all my reviews

I really enjoyed this book. The author does a solid job of explaining everything you need to know to write games for MIDP devices. If you are familiar with Jonathan Knudsen's book on J2ME (probably the best book on the subject), this book expands the single games chapter into a fun and interesting book.

The book starts with a quick sample showing us how to use the Sun IDE and how to run our games on the emulator and how to download our games to a phone. The author shows a couple of example games, a maze and a jumping game, that give a good overview of the basic techniques games use on MIDP devices. She then expands those examples by showing proper use of threads and shows how to play tones and music during a game. Storing information (such as high scores or user preferences) is demonstrated. Downloading game enhancements such as new levels for a dungeon game are also demonstrated. The book is full of well-commented code samples (worth stealing) that show the techniques being discussed.

The author of this book has a nice, easy to read style of writing. Her enthusiasm for the topic comes through and makes you want to try the many sample games. If you have been spending too much time on enterprise programming then playing around with some MIDP games might be just the antidote and this book will get you started on the fun.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Teaches nothing but bad coding practise, 13 Oct 2006

By	Mr. J. Crowe - See all my reviews

Badly written code, full of mistakes, games are boring and fail to properly teach the basics of games development!

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Next to worthless, 30 Jul 2006

By	Disappointed - See all my reviews

This book proves that so-called 'experts' are not necessarily the best people to explain things. If you want to learn about programmng J2ME games, this book is next to worthless.

The actual information contained in the book could be condensed into about 3 pages. But Carol Hamer stretches it out to about 280, by following every couple of paragraphs with 3-5 pages of code listing, much of which is just repeating the same code over and over again. The author unfortunately doesn't seem to understand that you don't need the entire program listing again every time she discusses one aspect of it.

Even in the parts of the book where the author is trying to impart information, the style of writing is so meandering and obtuse that you will need to read and re-read to try and see how you actually do things.

Here is an example of trying to glean information from this book. You read the paragraphs on using sprites. The actual process for creating a sprite will be supremely unclear, so you will then have to wade through pages of code which has nothing to do with sprites, in order to find the 3 lines of code where a sprite is instantiated.

I gave up using this book and instead I just rely on the excellent tutorials and explanations available of the web. With these, it takes about 2 minutes to find out how to use J2ME features. With this book, the same information takes hours to work out, and I usually ended up having to look on the web anyway.

The only good thing I can find to say about this book is that it doesn't take long to realise it is useless.

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