Reviews for Building PDA Databases for Wireless and Mobile Development

1. An important and timely book

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, May 12th, 2003

   There are many reasons that drove my consultant orthopaedic surgeon to buy a handheld. Shutting me up was perhaps the most important. It was a different set of reasons that made him addicted to his machine. Keeping his golf scores on his database was certainly the most important.

   And so it is for most clinicians – handwriting recognition, voice recording and digital photography make PDA devices cool. But storing data makes them useful.

   Furthermore PDA adoption is entering the next phase. Rather than individual purchases by enthusiastic individual, healthcare organizations are buying devices for entire departments. These devices are picked for their ability to integrate into existing IT infrastructure, and coincide with the rollout of wireless networks.

   So Building PDA Databses is an important and timely book.
   The book begins with a good introduction to handheld technology, database theory, and data warehousing methodology. Naturally this cannot be exhaustive, but it makes for a usable and approachable text.

   The authors then cover the products of several major database providers, including AppForge’s MobileVB, Sybase’s iAnywhere and IBM’s DB2. This list should tip you off to the scale of projects suggested – big. This is not surprising given the focus of their previous book, WAP Integration: Professional Developer’s Guide. Laberge and Vujosevic are experienced and expert in large corporate environments.

   This explains one of the weaknesses of the PDA coverage in book – it is rather biased towards the Microsoft, praising the iPaq for features that have been standard in Palm-compatibles for a long time and with better implementation. They also do not mention Satellite Forms, or HanDBase, perhaps the leading environments for medium-scale and small-scale projects respectively.

   On the other hand if the reader is interested in large-scale projects, the book becomes essential. The description of each database product’s feature set is useful for purchasing decisions. And the source code in the tutorials is enough to get the experienced developer going pretty quickly. It is thus best for informaticians, IT managers and software developers rather than clinicians. As the UK’s healthcare Trusts become more ambitious with their IT spending, the book should help with mobile access to everything from patient details to golf scores.