I have always been under the impression that when buying a book of technical nature, one is supposed to purchase a piece of an author's hard-earned, over-the-years experience, otherwise it's just paying for a documentation reprint. Such an experience can be conveyed to a reader in at least two major ways: (1.) a very well-organized, thought-through and consistent presentation of fundamental - yet often complex - concepts (e.g., "Head First Java" by Sierra), or (2.) an in-depth, unique perspective on advanced topics not to be found anywhere else (e.g., "Effective Java" by Bloch). Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this book delivers neither. As an example of the lack of the former: the discussion of J2ME Configurations and Profiles is almost as muddy and inconsequential as the specification site itself. As an example of the lack of the later: the entire Performance Tuning chapter, a subject I would expect to be critical for success with a mobile platform is about 10 pages, entire page -sized screenshots included. Topics such as real-world compatibility of J2ME across different vendors' implementations is almost not mentioned at all. So, what's left? Basically, a few hundred pages of short, introductory chapters on J2ME APIs, reading pretty much just like Sun Developer Network Reference technical articles or implementation-oriented CodeProject pages. Don't get me wrong, the book authors' hard effort is clearly visible, but you can as well google for "J2ME Record Store tutorial", a "J2ME Bluetooth API tutorial" and so on.
