Recently in Technical Book Reviews Category

I've just read Joshua Porter's book, designing for the social web, in under 1 day. I wish I had had it to hand 1 year ago. Porter manages to pack a huge amount of insight and great advice into under 180 pages. His style is easy to read and concise.

I've discovered quite a few new tricks which could be, and should have been, incorporated in Playyoo. I'm also relieved to say that I discovered a few things we've done right, or at least not too wrong.

In the whole book, I only found one thing I disagree with. Discussing user feedback, he says:

Actually, there is a third choice. If you really don't want to succeed, you can disagree with the feedback.

This, I think, is a little extreme. It also conflicts with the idea that any product, including a web application, benefits from a strong vision. Obviously, disagreeing with all feedback would be plain stupid, but I can't quite accept that all feedback is relevant.

Anyway, this is a minor point. Designing for the social web is a great little book, and deserves to become a classic. Highly recommended.

A few weeks ago I downloaded and read Cameron Moll's new book on Mobile Web Design. I highly recommend it to anybody interested in getting to grips with the mobile web.

Cameron Moll provides a concise, thoughtful and entertaining bird's eye view of a vast subject, and manages to provide sufficient detail to make it (very) worthwhile, without getting bogged down in details. He also provides a raft of useful links and references.

It should appeal to developers, designers and business analysts alike. I wish I had time to write a more in-depth review, but just now time is very short. So get over to the book's web site and check out the free sample.

Again, highly recommended. Five stars.

Nice to see that my trashing of "Mobile Web 2.0" is not living in a vacuum...

"By contrast, and at such events you can spot the losers because of the vast gap between their rhetoric and their achievements, was Ajit Jaokar. Like someone frantically banging a shoe against a gerkin in the hope of making a goulash, Ajit is determined to bring the utopian nonsense of Web 2.0 to mobile phones. He runs a Mobile Web 2.0 blog - and he's written a book about it all, he reminded us. ("Bang, bang! Shoe – make stew!")"

-- Andrew "loose canon" Orlowski writing in The Register. Cruel, unfair, but unfortunately absolutely spot on.

The blurb on Amazon tells us that "Mobile Strategies explains the different business models and strategies available for businesses looking to enter the mobile sector". Well, in this case, the book does exactly what the blurb says. Tom Weiss manages to pack an extremely complete overview of the mobile communications world into well under 200 pages. He does this with considerable style and a strong sense of narrative, whih makes "Mobile Strategies" not only worth reading, but actually pleasant to read. Obviously, he does not go into any great depth, but in terms of breadth there isn't much left out. Any book that manages to span a range like semaphore to up-to-the-minute Mobile TV in so few pages, and still remain substantial, is a rarity in the tech publishing world.

It is ironic that this book is published by the same company as "Mobile Web 2.0", which only just escapes being utterly hopeless. Tom Weiss clearly cares about style, presentation, typography and general writing and editing skills, and understands why they are important. He also obviously has a deep understanding of his chosen topic. It is a pity the authors of Mobile Web 2.0 did not pick up a few tips on both aspects before publishing their book.

For anybody getting into the mobile sector, or for anybody inside it in need of a breath of fresh air and a 30,000 feet view, "Mobile Strategies" is highly recommended.

I've just finished reading "Mobile Web 2.0" by Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish, published by Futuretext. The authors have a wealth of experience of the mobile telecommunications field between them, quite enough to know what a nightmare it is for application developers to engage with mobile operators. In a nutshell, the message from this book is to bypass the walled gardens and the endless hurdles put up by the telcos, and go direct to the customer using the web. So far so good. Obviously, there are certain limitations associated with the mobile web, in particular the fact that practically nobody in the real world uses it. Partly this is because of usability issues, both in devices and in delivery, partly because of cost, but I suspect largely due to the lack of any compelling reason. Well, perhaps we can at least do something about the last part, and the authors do, to some extent, point the way.

However, although the authors may be industry experts, I'm afraid their writing and editing skills are seriously substandard. This book puts me in mind of the "I'm going to read your my Powerpoint bullet list slides" experience. It is disjointed, repetitive, hopelessly formatted (really, it is straight out of Microsoft Word, and incompetent MS Word at that). It isn't just the mechanics of writing which are at fault. Often they start to present an argument, and just. Er, stop. The frequency of either "so what ?" or "pardon me ?" moments increases as the book goes on. The endless clumsy incremental summaries are also pointless filler. It isn't so much that they don't what they're talking about - I wouldn't want to imply that - but one does wonder if they ever reviewed any part of this serial braindump. I'm not expecting Shakespeare, but even technical writing needs to come up to a certain standard of literacy and layout. Especially when it is being sold.

There are other issues that annoy me: there is a strong underlying theme of playing to the "Web 2.0" gallery: these guys so much want to be the Tim O'Reilly of Mobile Web 2.0. Fine, but cut this out and the book would be far more readable and considerably shorter. Another thing is on consumer created content (same point really)... I'm sorry, but no way does Joe Bloggs in Seat 54, Row 91, Stand A, filming a World Cup game with his SonyEricsson V800 compete with a professional cameraman on the touchline. Get real guys - do you seriously think FIFA was worried about this stuff ? Never mind "spot the ball" - you'd be lucky to spot the pitch! Even if we accept the ridiculous statement that mobile phone video is up to "DVD quality" (actually a meaningless statement, but never mind), and even if we rule out the difference between a camera phone lens and a broadcast quality zoom, the skill of the operator plays an extremely significant part. I know you want to be quoted and loved by the Blogosphere, but come on....get real.

The emphasis on mobile TV seems way off-topic. DVB-H, DMB etc are broadcast technologies on a totally separate layer. It has nothing much to do with mobile communication, it simply co-exists. If we define "web" as a collaborative medium enabled largely by TCP/IP, then DVB-H doesn't come into it.

As a free download, or a collection of blog postings, "Mobile Web 2.0" would be worth a read. But at £20 from Amazon, sorry, it isn't worth it.