Up to: Mika Raento's Symbian Programming pages

Symbian Programming - Resources

To put together the information on these pages, there are a number of resources I use regularly (in addition to close reading of the headers).

Forums

• The best forum for general Symbian programming are the Symbian hosted developer discussion forums. The best thing is of course that they are newsgroups and not some damn unusable web forums. There's also an archive of the pre-2000 newsgroups.
• The Forum Nokia discussion groups are alright, but the S/N is not very good. Lot's of newbies posting the same questions over and over again, but there are some veterans (and the odd Nokia employee) posting answers as well.
• NewLC has Forums as well, with some information but a lot of noise.

Websites

• NewLC is the best 3rd party Symbian development site with articles and forums.
• Symbian's developer pages are worth checking out regularly. They have tech papers, extension libraries, documentation and links to open source stuff there.

Old SDKs

The older SDKs tended to have much more information in them, including debug symbols, debug source code, more headers etc. (Nokia: why did you remove these?). The most helpful for me have been:

• The ER5 SDK (ER5=Epoc32 Release 5, the predecessor of Symbian/Epoc32 6.0)
• The Nokia Symbian 6.0 SDK (Communicator 9200). Go to Forum Nokia and navigate to Tools and SDKs|C++|Nokia 9200 Communicator Series SDK (the links to Forum Nokia tend to die)

Books

Although online things are nice, there are a few books that you should get. The thing with the books is, they have been written by Symbian (ex-)employyees and show code examples that you just would not be able to put together by reading the docs.

• Symbian OS C++ for Mobile Phones by Richard Harrison is indispensable. This sort-of replaces the old Professional Symbian Programming book by Martin Tasker et al. (which might still be worth getting, though).
• Symbian OS Communications Programming by Michael J Jipping is a must for network programming.

I know that there are other books, but I haven't read them so I can't say much about them.

Remember still to take the code samples in these books with a grain of salt. Especially the client-server code in Symbian OS C++ for Mobile Phones is not robust enough for real-world code.

Open source software

The software written by others and released with source is often a great way to learn how to use the more difficult APIs. Here's a list of sites that I've used for source code examples.

• Peter van Sebille is one of the oldest Epoc/Symbian open source coders and has an understanding of the operating system that probably rivals anyone's inside Symbian. He mainly writes for SonyEricsson phones nowadays, but there a lot of lessons to be learned still.
• Hannu Viitala's page: Simple DirectMedia Layer port, CDoom, EMame9210, Frodo
• We've used Beat Gfeller's and Michael Rohs's VisualCodes two-dimensional barcode reader code for some of our work. It shows you how to access the camera as well as how to implement image processing within the limits of a Symbian smartphone.

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Mika Raento, mikie(at)iki.fi