Entrepreneur Geek

Do you dream of writing a book? A technical one? Three years ago, I was creating my future plan and writing 6 books was one of the top items in the list. 

Today, I have two books already in print and have learned a lot on the way. One of the lessons is to get the right publisher. I am fortunate to have Packt as the publisher of both my books – Mobile Web Development and Open Source Content Management Systems: Beginners Guide. 

A wannabe author will have a lot of questions. They may include:

• How is the overall experience of writing a book?
• During the writing process, what issues/ difficulties I may expect? And how to deal with them?
• Does writing a book overshadow personal life?
• I have a full time job, how do I manage my time?
• What benefits can writing a book bring to my specialist area?

Want to hear my story? Go ahead, and read my answers to these questions! At the end, I have valuable tips from my own experiences too!

Go, the inflight magazine of AirTran Airways carries an introductory article on Mobile Web. The author Lee Gimpel contacted me for inputs a while ago and I was glad to help. Clearly, mobile web is huge, and there is good amount of buzz around it these days. But like Amy Mischler of dotMobi said, it’s important to set your expectations and realize that you’re at the beginning of something that can really differentiate yourself.

Have you tried something on the mobile web yet? Did you read my book on it?

Aliza Sherman reviewed my Mobile Web Development book on the Web Worker Daily – a GigaOm site yesterday. One, it was good to be on GigaOm network (I am impressed with Om Malik and his ventures), and second Aliza had very positive comments for the book.

It was interesting to see her comparison of Mobile Web with the early days of Web. And how fascinating it was to learn HTML! Here’s what she says:

If I were still coding, this book would probably mean as much to me today as Teach Yourself HTML in a Week by Laura Lemay meant to me back in the 90s. Even as the person who hires the coders on development projects, it was an interesting read, particularly getting a glimpse of how far HTML has taken us and where it seems to be going.

She also says, “The gist of the book is to help you create mobile-friendly sites and mobile-ready apps.”

That’s pretty good! Thanks Aliza for your affirmation on the value of the book!

And while on the topic, I must not forget the excellent review Joe Dolson did a while ago. Joe said:

My overall reaction to this book was positive. It covers a wide variety of key issues for mobile web programming in an easily understood manner.

Mehta goes out of his way on many occasions to emphasize the serious importance of considering who (and what!) will be using your mobile web application.

Joe is a good critic, and identifies three problems with the book too. Thanks Joe for doing a thorough review!

For more reviews, checkout MyMobileWeb’s review, Martin’s chapter by chapter overview and the reviews on Amazon.

Also the example chosen is simple but at the same time enlightening. The author has demonstrated that he has done an excellent research on open source tools and standards for mobile web development. The chapter on Mobile AJAX has been also a very good choice, as Mobile AJAX is the future. (from Morfeo / MyMobileWeb)

In this book you find the outline of the mobile web applications development world, some principles for self-study, some useful hints and examples and – last but not least – the inspiration. I would recommend this book to every developer interested in the mobile web. (from Dev::Info)

One of the biggest hurdles in mobile web development is to make the site usable on different devices. You can follow the least common denominator approach and use only those features that will work on all target phones. But many a times you want to take advantage of device specific features in your mobile web.

What do you do then?

Well, you adapt the design and content to the device! And how do you do that?

Read the Chapter 4 of my Mobile Web Development book! It shows you exactly how to adapt your XHTML MP based mobile website to different devices using WALL, WURFL etc.

Here’s the chapter outline:

• What is Adaptation?
  • Do I Need Adaptation?
  • Can’t I just Use Common Capabilities and Ignore the Rest?
  • How to Determine the LCD?
  • OK, So How do I Adapt?
• Fancy Pizza Selection
  • What are Those <wall:*> Tags?
  • Let’s Make Sense of This Code!
    • Can I Use All XHTML Tags?
    • Will This Work Well for WML?
• Device Detection and Capabilities
  • XML Processing can Bog Down My Server, is There Something Easier?
  • What About W3C’s DIAL?

• Other Useful Tools for Adaptation
  • Dynamically Resizing Images
  • Quick and Easy Way to Make Your Blog Mobile
  • MyMobileWeb: Going the Semantic Way
  • HAWHAW: As Simple as a Laugh?

Click on the image below to download the free PDF.