I am looking for a mobile web development book(s). Possibly one book about design best practices and one or two about the actual implementation of the technologies for mobile, namely JavaScript, HTML, CSS, accessing device API such as location and messaging through browser.
Any book suggestions and descriptions of said book would be very much appreciated.
I am an experienced OOP developer that has done some work on J2ME, BB, and Android but no substantial work on the web side of things.
That's a toughie, because different platforms still treat HTML/CSS and JavaScript differently, and there is little to no consistency in terms of the different APIs between device platforms.
The best suggestions I can muster is to look at some of the available "frameworks" out there for this sort of thing as a starting point for your foray into the web side of app development.
Sencha Touch - http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/ JQuery Touch - http://www.jqtouch.com/
These may be a good start to get the hang of how things look and get implemented in a mobile environment. In terms of API though; your best friend is probably going to be the API documentation provided by whoever produced the platform.
Depending on how flexible you are when you say "book", this will hopefully help you out. It's a very, very thorough guide of best practices for mobile-targeted web development:
And it's from w3, who have some super-handy web development tutorials you may also find useful, though they're not quite as book-ish:
If you want a real, physical book, the only one I can recommend is HTML5 for Web Designers, which is fantastic:
http://books.alistapart.com/products/html5-for-web-designers
Good luck!
With this book, you'll learn the intricacies and pitfalls involved in building HTML and CSS-based apps that you can extend to work with particular devices, including the iPhone, Nokia, Blackberry, Android devices, and other smartphones. You'll not only learn how to deal with platform variations, finicky browsers, CSS compatibility, and other issues, but also how to create pleasant user experiences in a constrained environment.
I have this book, and it should cover most of what you're looking for.
Any mobile phones in particular? The support is extremely different between devices.
iPhone/iPad/iPod and Android phones have excellent support, on the other hand most Nokia/Blackberry/Samsung etc have extremely crap support.
If I was to suggest any books they would be related to HTML, and especially HTML5 if you want to use some of the new features (Geolocation, DragnDrop, Canvas etc).
So if I were you, I would most likely focus on the following resources (in no particular order)
I doubt any decent books have yet been written, mostly due to the fact that a lot of this is changing at a mind-boggling rate. Even if there are books out there, chances are they're outdated or will soon become.
Hope this helps.
While I agree with jduren, I do have a general web development favorite:
Designing with Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman
My favorite web book of all time.
Hello
Good resource for mobile web development.
When you develop a mobile website it is very important from marketing point of view that you share same domain for your standard website as well as mobile website.
For e.g. your standard website domain is www.standard.com, there are two things you can do when any user is browsing this domain from mobile device
1) Detect if request is coming from mobile device redirect user to http://standard.mobi
2) Detect if request is coming from mobile device redirect user to http://www.standard.com/mobile/
Above are two way of redirecting the user automatically to mobile optimized pages instead of asking user to browse the mobile website.
To achieve above it is very important that you detect the mobile request perfectly.
Please take a look at http://51degrees.codeplex.com/. It is an ASP.NET open source module which detects mobile devices and provides auto redirection to mobile optimized pages when request is coming from mobile device. It makes use of WURFL mobile device database. For redirection there is no need to modify existing ASP.NET web application pages.
Apart from this it also gives upto-date mobile capability information like manufacturer, model, screen height & width, image formats supported and MANY MORE...... which helps to customize pages for best mobile output.
Hope above helps you for your development.
Some books, specifically about mobile web develop, that I'd recommend:
Mobile Web Design - Excellent & highly recommended.
Mobile Internet For Dummies - Good background info
