This is one of the first books published on WAP programming and covers the most commonly encountered areas of the subject. Every section of the book provides good examples that are well supported by the text. WAP architecture is detailed, WML is thoroughly explained, an introduction to WMLScript is provided along with a basic tutorial on the use and application of Perl scripting and Java servlets for WAP programming. All the software packages required to implement the examples are provided on the accompanying CD, although some of the tools are outdated and some are quite difficult to configure.

Throughout the book the author assumes a basic knowledge of HTML and I would not recommend this title to a reader who has no prior experience of web programming. The technical content of this book was checked by a member of Nokia prior to publication and so as you would expect all the examples are accurate, however they do suffer from lack of comments despite the author emphasising the importance of their use! My main criticism of this book is the separation of the examples from their description, the examples are sometimes up to three pages away from the text describing them and this quickly becomes frustrating.

As an introduction for beginners this book is quite hard to read but does provide a good grounding for the persistent reader; for WML and WMLScript it forms an excellent reference resource. The Java and CGI sections appear lost with too much being covered in too small a space and in my opinion their omission would make the book more suited to beginners. Despite these downsides I believe that this book has a place on every WAP programmers bookshelf.