Excellent reference with expert insight into the future evolution of mobile communications: 4G IP for 4G examines the concept of 4G, providing an in-depth background to the key technologies and developments shaping the new generation of mobile servi...

If you’ve got your hands on this year’s hottest new smartphone, you’ll want the book that covers it inside and out: Palm Pre: The Missing Manual. This beautiful, full-color book from USA Today personal-technology columnist Ed Baig will help you go from newcomer to expert in no time.

The maker of the legendary Palm Pilot is back on center stage with a smartphone that lets you browse the Web, listen to music, watch video, view pictures, and a lot more. Palm Pre: The Missing Manual provides you with everything you need to know to get the most out of this amazing mobile tool.

• Get to know the touchscreen, and learn to navigate by tapping, swiping, dragging, flicking, and pinching
• Link your contacts, merge calendars, combine email accounts, and more by syncing your phone over the Web
• Stay in touch with other people by using the Pre as a full-featured phone and organizer
• Use it for email, texting, chatting, and as an efficient web browser
• Take advantage of the Pre as a complete media center to store, sort, play, stream music and video, and sync with iTunes
• Take and view photos, import images, and share them with others

Peer-to-peer computing has gained significant attention from both industry and research communities in the past decade as the number of users worldwide continues to grow along with demand for mobile computing. Mobile Peer-to-Peer Computing for Next Generation Distributed Environments: Advancing Conceptual and Algorithmic Applications focuses on current research and innovation in mobile and wireless technologies that address challenges from both a theoretical and applied perspective. This advanced publication provides researchers, practitioners, and academicians with an authoritative reference source to the latest state-of-the-art developments in this growing technology field.

The iPhone and iPod touch have provided all software developers with a level playing field—developers working alone have the same access to consumers as multinational software publishers. Very cool indeed! To make your application stand out from the crowd, though, it has to have that something extra. You must learn the skills to take your apps from being App Store filler to download chart-topping blockbusters.

Developers with years of experience helped write this book. Spend some time understanding their code and why they took the approach they did. You will find the writing, illustrations, code, and sample applications second to none. No matter what type of application you are writing, you will find something in this book to help you make your app that little bit cooler.

The book opens with Wolfgang Ante, the developer behind the Frenzic puzzle game, showing how timers, animation, and intelligence are used to make game play engaging. It moves on to Rogue Amoeba’s Mike Ash explaining how to design a network protocol using UDP, and demonstrating its use in a peer-to-peer application—a topic not normally for the faint of heart, but explained here in a way that makes sense to mere mortals. Gary Bennett then covers the important task of multithreading. Multithreading can be used to keep the user interface responsive while working on other tasks in the background. Gary demonstrates how to do this and highlights traps to avoid along the way.

Next up, Canis Lupus (aka Matthew Rosenfeld) describes the development of the Keynote-controlling application Stage Hand, how the user interface has evolved, and the lessons he has learned from that experience. Benjamin Jackson then introduces two open source libraries: cocos2d, for 2D gaming; and Chipmunk, for rigid body physics (think “collisions”). He describes the development of Arcade Hockey, an air hockey game, and explains some of the code used for this.

Neil Mix of Pandora Radio reveals the science behind processing streaming audio. How do you debug what you can’t see? Neil guides you through the toughest challenges, sharing his experience of what works and what to watch out for when working with audio. Finally, Steven Peterson demonstrates a comprehensive integration of iPhone technologies. He weaves Core Location, networking, XML, XPath, and SQLite into a solid and very useful application.

Software development can be hard work. Introductory books lay the foundation, but it can be challenging to understand where to go next. This book shows some of the pieces that can be brought together to make complete, cool applications.