Symbian Blog

I’m Satu McNabb, editor in the Symbian Technical Communications team, and I’d like to give you an update on Symbian’s books.

eBooks

We’re proud to announce our first eBook, Demand Paging on Symbian by Jane Sales. The book can be downloaded as pdf for free.

Working initially on the SDN++ wiki, Jane combined engineering documentation with information from the base engineers working on demand paging, and created a manuscript which we then took for review, copy edit and typeset. The result is a short book that provides a comprehensive and highly detailed insight into the workings of demand paging on Symbian.

This text will be invaluable for people who are:

• Creating a new, demand-paged device
• Writing device drivers for a demand-paged environment (or porting them)
• Wanting to understand demand paging on Symbian
• Students studying real-time operating systems
• Middleware programmers understanding the behavior of underlying systems
• Systems engineers comparing Symbian with other similar operating systems.

Wiki books

As I mentioned, Jane wrote Demand Paging on Symbian by working on a wiki, allowing comments and edits from reviewers as she went along. We’re kicking off another wiki book project on the developer.symbian.org wiki to create a book about Python on Symbian. Pankaj Nathani and Bogdan Galiceanu will be the lead authors, and they have already created a table of contents. They invite you to review the table of contents and consider whether you’d like to get involved, for example, by:

• Suggesting changes to the contents of the book
• Writing one or more of the sections they propose
• Reviewing sections of the book as it takes shape.

When the wiki book is in good shape, Pankaj and Bogdan will submit it as a manuscript to us for copy editing and typeset. We’ll then release the book as the eBook (like the Demand Paging title). The wiki copy will live on so that updates can be made and transferred into the eBook regularly.

Symbian books

With the kind permission of John Wiley & Sons Ltd, we have put several existing books about Symbian on the developer wiki. The books have been added as wiki text so they can be updated and expanded. We currently have the following books:

• Symbian OS Communications Programming

• Symbian OS Internals

We plan to put other books onto the wiki in due course. The transfer from printed book to wiki is not perfect or complete in places – please bear with us and feel free to jump in and make edits to a page if you spot areas that can be updated or improved.

How you can get involved

We welcome any contributions and changes to our existing wiki books or please get involved in working on the new Python wiki book project. If you’d like to start a book project of your own, please contact us, or just go ahead and put a table of contents on the wiki and start asking for contributions! The Book category of the wiki, is the best place to check for new book chapters and contributions, and you’ll also find an article there which suggests other ways you can get involved, and some discount codes for Symbian books published by John Wiley & Sons.

Another open book that you might find useful is Bryan O’Sullivan’s Mercurial: The Definitive Guide.

If you’d like to have a chat about contributing, would like to get in touch with Pankaj and Bogdan or have an idea for a new book, you can email me at satum@symbian.org.