Common Design Patterns for Symbian OS: The Foundations of Smartphone Software

1.1. About this Book

If you've ever asked yourself 'How do the experts architect software for mobile devices?' then this book is for you. Common Design Patterns for Symbian OS collects the wisdom and experience of some of Symbian's finest software engineers. It distils their knowledge into a set of common design patterns that you can use when creating software for Symbian smartphones.

This book helps you negotiate the obstacles often found when working on a smartphone platform. Knowing the potential problems, and the patterns used to solve them, will give you a head start in designing and implementing robust and efficient applications and services on Symbian OS.

This book is not intended to be a quick start guide to Symbian OS, nor to explain its design or architecture. Other titles from Symbian Press do just that, for example [Harrison and Shackman, 2007] and [Morris, 2007]. Rather, it aims to capture expert knowledge about programming practice specific to Symbian OS and make it available to all developers working with Symbian OS.

We welcome your feedback and contributions and so we have provided a wiki page at developer.symbian.com/design_patterns_wikipage where you can post your experiences with the patterns we describe and share additional patterns that you know of for Symbian OS.