Location-Aware Applications Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Location-Aware Applications? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Location-Aware Applications. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Location-Aware Applications ReviewI had high hopes for this based on the book summary and table of contents, but was ultimately disappointed. My feeling is the book tried to cover too much for too many people, and went into too much depth in some areas, and not enough in others. It got surprisingly technical in areas I wouldn't have expected (going into a good amount of detail about different positioning technologies used by mobile devices that are normally abstracted away through a platform API), but provided overly simplistic code samples that weren't really helpful because they were just single code listings taken out of the context of a larger app.
This was the main problem with the technical areas - too much was trying to be covered, and none of it was done in great detail. I don't feel I could have taken any of the code listings and integrated them into a real world project because they were simplistic, and I think just meant to provide a flavor of development on with the given platform/technology. Instead of such toy examples what I would have liked to have seen are more useful location oriented formulas and algorithms (distance formulas; ways to calculate bearing; accuracy of different models of the earth and their complexity; how the equator, prime meridian, and international dateline interact with these; basic navigation algorithms; etc) with pseudocode or recommendations for further reading. I was looking forward to the section on performance and caching that I noticed in the TOC. I should have noticed it was only two pages long. Here's the summary of their caching advice: use memcached so you're not hitting your DB every time you need to look up a user account. Great, thanks, that's really helpful. What I really would have liked would have been something that's remotely related to the topic of your book! How should I cache frequently used location data? R-trees? Geohashes? Simple binary search against ordered lat/lon data? These sort of relevant and long-term subjects would have been much more useful than the glut of information that is out of date as soon as the book is published (market share data, app store data, etc).
As a developer I thought the strongest chapters were actually the non-technical ones. The privacy chapter was especially thought provoking, and the chapter on monetization strategies was also interesting. The chapters on app distribution and securing a business strategy (which basically tried to cram a start-up boot camp into twenty-odd pages) seemed like filler since they really weren't relevant to location aware apps specifically. If someone's really going to create a business around an app those two chapters aren't going to be much help.
Finally the book needed a good final round of copy editing. Appendix A was referred to as both Java and JavaScript code (and why was it the only code listing separate from the content?). Footnotes were inconsistent (some with an http prefix, some without) and repetitive (how many times do we need to know the iPhone or Android developer URLs?). A few code samples had issues (Listing 4.6 being the worst offender with annotations waaaay out of place).
Despite the problems mentioned above I don't regret the time spent reading it. Learning details about the underlying positioning technologies was interesting, if not very useful since any SDK I use will hide the gory details from me. The non-technical chapters were enjoyable, and would spur discussion if you're just about to start up a location-aware project for the first time.Location-Aware Applications Overview

Want to learn more information about Location-Aware Applications?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now