Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Book Review: PhoneGap Beginner's Guide

Phonegap Beginner's Guide by Andrew Lunny delivers exactly what the title promises as it is a good guide to developers just getting started with PhoneGap. The book walks you through the installation of the PhoneGap framework, shows you how to develop and debug your application in a web browser before bringing it over to the device and describes a number of HTML5/CSS3 features you can take advantage of without even needing PhoneGap. Then the book walks you through a number of areas of device functionality that the PhoneGap API like the accelerometer, camera and contacts. Plus there is a chapter devoted to extending PhoneGap functionality using the Plugin API.

The only con that I can point out is that the book does not completely describe the available PhoneGap API, nor should it really as it is targeted at beginners. I can't fault Andrew at all as a lot of the currently functionality was delivered after the books was sent to be published. One thing you should be aware of is that chapter 9 describes the navigator.service.contacts interface which is now navigator.contacts.

I do recommend this book for PhoneGap and fledgling hybrid mobile application developers. Probably the easiest way to get it is as an ebook from Packt.

5 comments:

Pranav Bhandarkar said...

Hi Simon,

I find your blog extremely informative. As you advised I downloaded this book and have been trying to setup phonegap-android as per the instructions in this book. I see that the following clone command just does not seem to work
$>git://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-android.git
Cloning into phonegap-android...
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

I understand this could be a github account setting issue, but I have verified all the github troubleshooting techniques. I also could not find phonegap/phonegap-anroid.git on github (I may be blind though ;))

So my question is: Has the git repo changed ? And if so, is the book still useful ?

Simon MacDonald said...

@Pranav

The book is still valid but the location of the code on github has changed to:

https://github.com/apache/incubator-cordova-android.git

You will probably want to grab the 1.4.1 tag though as we are making big changes for 1.5 and it may not be super stable right now.

Pranav Bhandarkar said...

Hi Simon,

Thanks for pointing me to the right github URL.

abhishek said...

@pranav
can you provide me the link from where you have downloaded this book. i too interested in exploring phonegap.
Thanks in adavance.

Simon MacDonald said...

@abhishek

There is a link at the bottom of my post where you can go get the book from Packt publishing.