The Houston Palm Users Group has spun off a Developers group that will be hosting a study group for beginning Palm OS developers. If you live near Houston you are invited to attend meetings (schedule to be announced soon--please email me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] to receive announcements). If not, but you are interested in participating in an online version of the study group that will run concurrently, visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/palmhacks and become a member. Please introduce yourself to the group as someone who wants to participate in the study group and preferably tell us a little about your background.
Below is an excerpt from a post to that forum which outlines what the study group will be doing. I expect the study group to begin within the next few weeks, depending on our ability to get a room for the local members to meet in (approval to meet at the Houston Area League of PC Users is pending). Comments and suggestions welcome. --David Beers, palmhacks moderator Hopefully, some day we'll have multiple study groups running concurrently with different areas of focus and different leaders. This first group is aimed at newcomers to the Palm OS who may or may not have practical experience programming in C but are willing to put some time on their own into learning the C language. 1. To accommodate people using either of the two most popular development environments, CodeWarrior and PRC-Tools, I will recommend as a primary text _Palm OS Programming: The Developers Guide (2nd Edition_ by Neil Rhodes and Julie McKeehan (publisher: O'Reilly). This book offers excellent instructions on getting set up in either development environment, updates these instructions from a companion web site as new versions of the environments come out, and gives pretty much equal time to these environments throughout the book. Most other Palm programming books focus on CodeWarrior, giving you a CD with "CodeWarrior Lite" that is fine for doing the exercises, but isn't much use for doing serious Palm development. 2. Even though I'm referring to the O'Reilly book as our "primary text", I want to encourage people to use other books that they like, or use simply the documentation available for free from www.palmos/dev. So for this reason our syllabus will be organized by topic and I will attempt to map each topic to page numbers, URLs, or sample projects from several other books and online tutorials. Some of us are book junkies (myself included) and like to use multiple books. Some of us are suffering from the weak tech economy (i.e. unemployed and on a tight budget) and may prefer to use the free documentation. So that everyone can follow the syllabus and participate, O'Reilly will be the trunk but not the branches of our learning tree. I think we can all benefit from people sharing things they got from other sources, so I want to promote that as much as I can. 3. The study group will have a face-to-face and an online component. Ideally, both forums will support each other, but also have a life of their own. The online interaction isn't quite "real time" but it can at least be a daily interaction, and of course it can involve a much larger group of people. The local group has the advantage of getting us out of the house and meeting people, which is healthy and energizing. We don't have a meeting schedule yet. I haven't decided whether to have a weekly or bi-monthly meeting, but I'm leaning toward weekly if we can settle on a day and time each week and get enough of you to come. But whatever the schedule, the local meetings should include a presentation by a member (or maybe a visiting speaker) on the current syllabus topic. Offering to do presentations isn't mandatory, but we need people to volunteer for this to work well. It's very good to have the experience of presenting. Even though the meetings will be pretty informal and interactive, the advance preparation will teach you a lot! Presenters, as a rule, learn the most and the quickest. If presenters can write up some notes, maybe supply some sample code, (if you're ambitious, a PowerPoint presentation!!) this will be greatly appreciated since these can become files that are uploaded to the Files section of this web site for everyone to use. If you have time to load them up in advance of a meeting, great. Otherwise, afterwards is fine. I will also try to document our meetings myself by making posts or uploads to the Files section. In fact, we'll organize the Files area into topics that follow the syllabus and everyone will be encouraged to create sample projects and save them up there for others to examine (or most importantly, to help debug). That's all I have time to write about at the moment. For now, if you are interested in joining this study group, we will be getting started soon, so I encourage you to start getting your programming environment set up, get a copy of O'Reilly if you can (make sure it's the 2nd edition, not the 1st, which is pretty out of date), or download the Palm OS Programmers Companion and Palm OS Programmers API from www.palmos.com/dev so you can read these in PDF format or print them out. Let me know about other books you would like to use and I'll take a look at them. I have a bunch already! Finally, if you haven't already, please drop me an email to tell me you'd like to participate. If you are local, let me know about preferences for the meeting schedule and I'll do my best to accommodate. David -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
