Welcome to BlackBerry Development Fundamentals. I hope you enjoy reading this book and keep it on your bookshelf for a long time. After working for Research In Motion (RIM) and helping its customers understand their options for building custom applications for the BlackBerry platform, I knew the time was right for a book like this. Although the world is full of developers who know how to build applications for desktop, server, and even mobile platforms, many people building their first applications for BlackBerry just don’t know where to start. The BlackBerry has so many interesting and unique capabilities, and the BlackBerry applications platform does so much for the developer that it’s difficult to quickly learn everything you need to know to be productive.

Although a lot of information on the topic is available online, you’d have to do a lot of digging and searching to find everything you needed. Much of the information available assumes that you already kinda know how to do these things.1 There is a lot of “how-to” information on the BlackBerry Developers website and elsewhere on the web, but I wrote this book to help provide some of the missing “how it works” and the “why’s” that go along with it.

I spent many years of my career as an educator, teaching Lotus Notes/Domino Developer & Administrator courses, plus Novell NetWare Administrator courses full time. Because of this, I laid out the chapters and content in a way that lent itself to educating the reader rather than just dumping everything I know onto pages. Inside, you’ll see chapters arranged like building blocks, covering topics and introducing concepts to make the content in later chapters easily digestible.