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The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
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Title:
Wireless Internet Enterprise Applications
Author:
Chetan Sharma
ISBN:
0 471 39382 7
Publisher:
Wiley
Pages:
236pp
Price:
£21-50
Reviewer:
Aaron Ridout
Subject:
internet
Appeared in:
15-1
From cover to cover this book says what you'd expect from the title and it is written authoritatively and concisely but from a mainly USA point of view.

This book is an excellent overview of wireless applications via the Internet or m-commerce. If you need to know what technologies are around now and in the near future, then this book will give a great overview of the technologies and most of the pitfalls best avoided.

This book is mainly for business and technical consultants rather than developers, but that is the stated audience.

The author has obviously tried to include international aspects and has done a good job, but unless you've done it... To be fair the only things left out were Data Protection and Currency conversion.

In 236 pages I found 15 pages with anything I could remotely comment upon and only three of those could be considered detrimental to the reader:

1) The bandwidths for 2.5G and 3G quoted are the original optimistic ones, as reality gets closer all the network operators have down-sized their data-rate figures.

2) EU law, in relation to data protection and privacy, is not mentioned under Internationalisation and Privacy section.

3) One screen image is incorrect and the text verses tables are not on the same pages occasionally.

There are only a few topics that I'd have added:

a) PKI is not mentioned directly but most aspects of it are,

b) The Biometrics section does not talk about repudiation and assumes that anyone can get a class-A certificate 'I am whom I say I am' - Why is it so difficult to get a passport?

c) Currency conversion is not included (assumes that US$ are the international currency)

d) The European Union and presumably other jurisdictions have different Data Protection laws, which may have to be designed into a web-based application.

Highly recommended, but slight USA bias.