Beside his well known quirksmode blog, he collaborated with Vodafone, NOKIA, and many others, while I've worked in the meanwhile on Mobile HTML5 NOKIA Maps, for a short time at Mobile Facebook site as well as Mobile Twitter site for the last couple of years so ... we both kinda come from the same multitude of devices, OSs, immature browsers and APIs, passing through the dream and the partial lie behind Mobile HTML5 Development and its ability to replace native.
This review will be somehow short and targeted, but hopefully great for the future of the Mobile Web itself ... uh wait, I've forgot the book name and link: The Mobile Web Handbook
As a Manager, you should read it!
The bold approach of the book is enlightening reaching the point even big corporates are mentioned in all their faults in terms of management and/or focus and/or outdated vision.As a manager, you can learn how not to loose focus and/or screw up not just your team but potentially the entire company you are working for ... which you know, it's in your best interests!
First couple of chapters would be enough to understand what I am talking about, but being the book not that technical at all, you will learn and enjoy everything else too, or at least its key/core concepts, specially when it comes to write down pros and cons behind HTML5 and the Mobile Web.
As a Web Developer, you should read it!
Specially behind "the must have frameworks or libraries" culture, there are too many developers thinking there is "just one web" and every approach will scale across all platforms and devices ... you have no idea how deadly wrong you could be, and if you have no experience with the Mobile world but you do Web, you inevitably need to learn more from this parallel world because it's so different in all concepts we know and learned online so far, the day you'll have to create something mobile, you don't want to be the last ignorant in the universe that "didn't think about that problem" or believed that, as example, holding everything in RAM 'cause modern laptops have a huge amount of it, it's a good idea that scales out there ... read this book and double check your practices, you might realize there's so much you could actually drop instead of keeping bloating your dependencies!You've seriously nothing to loose here, only to grow in terms of Web related knowledge, for today or tomorrow devices or just laptops (e.g. do you really know what do you need for a touch screen? Quick hint: no)
As a Mobile Developer, you should read it!
I have to be honest here, being exactly that kind of Mobile Web developer Peter describes in his book, most of the concepts and hints were not new to me but I have learned a lot regardless my experience on basically all mentioned OSs and devices in the book (tons of them, not just the silly Android or iPhone scene).There are few concept explained behind way deeper analysis that I could have ever thought about, like the one after Who Killed My Battery, a study from Stanford University about how bad could be libraries such jQuery or others for your phone battery life ... I let you read the book in order to understand all takeaways here.
Things I disagreed
The plural is actually too much since there's basically only one concept I don't agree with Peter and it's about Pointer Events. Not only I've written already what I think about them and what's their current state, but Peter himself re-convinced me touch and mouse are completely different beasts, unfortunately struggling later on to counter-proof it makes sense to have both in a single stream ... no, it doesn't, IMO, it's just a mess at the end of the day, due all things you need to take care of inside the stream behind a single "eventname" instead of separating concerns outside it through those meaningful and semantic events. He even ended up suggesting mouseout and mouveover as events a part and beside pointer events, so that he basically described everything I think is wrong with these pointer events themselves! However, he did argument properly his point of view so I'll let you judge by your own the touch VS mouse VS pen VS new iWatch wheel VS ... how screwed is that part of the story.
