Review: Mobile Phone Programming - Symbian Series 60/UIQ DVD
Score:
76%
And now for something completely different. Hot on the heels of comments on Russ's blog about Symbian OS being too difficult to develop for, here's a DVD that claims to teach you how to develop for Symbian in less than 24 hours. It essentially represents the sort of content you'd get at an all-in-one 'Symbian OS for C++ experts' training day, with Rosso as your personal instructor, all for $25.
Most of the DVD's content is made up of PowerPoint presentation captures and live screen captures of Rosso running the various software tools needed, with a constant voice over, explaining what's going on. Rosso is of Persian origin but a native Swede, who studied in Paris and now lives in the USA. Which explains his thick and somewhat unplaceable accent, but you quickly get used to this and the soundtrack is clear enough.
Although the first two or three (of the nine total, each of which are around 20 minutes in length) chapters are easy enough to understand by anyone reasonably technical and give you enough confidence to at least get the tools installed and 'Hello world' up and running, you'll need a detailed knowledge of C++ to progress much further. Which is fine, as this DVD is unashamedly a primer to get C++ programmers up to speed with Symbian, but note that if you come from a different background (e.g. OPL or Visual Basic) then you'll need to find other training material to get you up the separate C++ learning curve.
There are several oddities worth mentioning. Firstly, some of the screen grabs from Rosso's high resolution monitor degrade rather horribly when reduced to typical PAL DVD resolution. 
There's not much that could have been done about this, apart from increased use of his magnifier software, which would present distraction problems of a different kind. Secondly, there are a small number of video editing anomalies, where content gets chopped off or duplicated. And the volume of the audio soundtrack varies quite a bit within a chapter, depending on how loud Rosso is speaking into his headset mike.
The final oddity is the overlong focus on Michael Jackson images throughout the introduction (as part of a demo multimedia app). Yes, we know he's innocent, but still....
These are only minor quibbles though. As someone who's put together video tutorials in the past (for Psion and Palm), I know only too well how time consuming it is putting all this material together, and Mobile Phone Programming is obviously a labour of love, with around three hours of material for $25.
For an established C++ programmer looking to move into developing for Symbian, this is just the ticket and won't break the bank.
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at