Programming Visual Basic for the Palm OS  Buy it at Amazon Read a Sample Chapter From The Publisher
	Author Patrick Burton, Roger Knoell, Matt Holmes Publisher O'Reilly Length 432 pages vbRad Rating: 4 fingers up. (4 out of 5) Reviewed by Robert

Now there have been other books that talked about vb programming for palm, but those catered to a complete newbie and didn't get into the complicated entities of the application. This book caters to a seasoned vb programmer who wants to move the skills to the Palm OS.

AppForge rolled out its software in the late 2000 and it was a fairly modest piece of software, delivering a small subset of Palm OS capabilities. Since then, the toolkit has grown tremendously, and now it targets pretty much 100% of Palm functionality, plus some functionality beyond Palm (such as usage of true type fonts). This book makes a pretty quick work of all these issues.

It starts with the basics, laying out a simple application with database capabilities. Then the authors move on to more advanced topics such as conduit development (i.e. syncronization), RDBMS connectivity and developing web clipping applications.

The latter part of the book delves into topics such as accessing functions provided by the OS but not exposed by the AppForge runtime (not a simple task in AppForge). The chapter on shared memory is quite interesting give Palm's In Place Execution (which means the OS doesn't need to load the app into RAM - it just executes it in place). These chapters include examples that utilize C/C++ programming language.

Towards the end you will find chapters on Piedmont (framework for developing components that run on both Windows and Palm) and Palm debugging, including topics on conditional compilation and Palm Reporter.

All in all, a great book for those needing to write a Palm app.