The current Symbian Press list focuses very much on the small scale features of Symbian OS in a programming context. The Architecture Sourcebook is different.
It's not a how-to book, it's a 'what and why' book. And because it names names as it unwinds the design decisions which have shaped the OS, it is also a 'who' book. It will show where the OS came from, how it has evolved to be what it is, and provide a simple model for understanding what it is, how it is put together, and how to interface to it and work with it. It will also show why design decision were made, and will bring those decisions to life in the words of Symbian's key architects and developers, giving an insider feel to the book as it weaves the `inside story` around the architectural presentation.
The book will describe the OS architecture in terms of the Symbian system model. It will show how the model breaks down the system into parts, what role the parts play in the system, how the parts are architected, what motivates their design, and how the design has evolved through the different releases of the system.
Key system concepts will be described; design patterns will be explored and related to those from other operating systems. The unique features of Symbian OS will be highlighted and their motivation and evolution traced and described.
The book will include a substantial reference section itemising the OS and its toolkit at component level and providing a reference entry for each component.
User review
An OS background book
Is this book worth the investment? The answer really depends on your purpose to read, it's neither a heavy-weight programming book, nor a detailed architectural book in a straight technical sense. Rather it's a book quite loosely organized, and filling with interviews, reflections, stories.
Non of the other Symbian books I read touched the motivation for using C++, the background behind unique Symbian features like active objects, two stage constructions etc. I appreciate more about Ecom and descriptors about finishing the book, worth mentioning is that the interviews with top Symbian figures like Colly Myers, David Wood etc also proved to be very insightful and worth a second read, to give you an idea, here is an except from chapter 3:
/****
Charles Davies:
When I was interviewing people I used an example of a terminal emulation program. Here is a program that indisputably gets events not just from the user. The normal, naïve way of writing an interactive application at that time would be to wait for a keypress, see what keypress it was, and respond to it; was it a function key, was it any other key? You'd have some horrible case statement responding to a keypress. So I would ask, `How would you write an application where you don't know whether your next input is coming through the serial port or from the keypress?' And if they had a good answer to it they got hired, and if they didn't, they didn't.
*****/
The only reason that I did not gave it 5 stars because it barely touches the shortcomings of Symbian's treatment and decisions in the whole sphere of the OS arena, such as the performance tradeoff between microkernel and monolithic.
BTW, this book was written in late 2006 and the latest SOS version at that time was 9.3, the current Symbian OS version I am using is v9.6.
User review
Please ignore the above comment
I cannot believe that someone gives a book 1-star rating just because (s)he didn't find the ToC of a book. This is not fair to a decent book. I read this book while completing a research paper on comparison of mobile computing platforms. The chapter that introduces the architecture of Symbian OS and Symbian C++ development framework is very clear and comprehensive. Given the many components of Symbian platform, I would say it's worth reading.
I rate the book as a 5-star one to counteract the first comment. Seriously this is a 4-star book.
Btw: Amazon normally does not put the ToC of a book online. You can search for ToC on the publisher's website.
User review
Could anybody provide TOC for this book?
It should be an expectable book for Symbian fans. but even the table of content is not available online. less than sample chapters.
