“Brian has hit the mark with this title! Mobile development is about so much more than APIs and the latest models of phones—it is about making a difference in the way we live, work and play. Reading this book should be the first task in any new mobile development project. Period.”

—Frank Ableson
President MSI Services Inc.
Author of Unlocking Android
Mobile Editor for Linux Magazine

March 2011

Thank you for your interest and support for Mobile Design and Development: Practical Concepts and Techniques for Creating Mobile Sites and Web Apps the book I wrote in 2008-2009 and published by O'Reilly in September 2009!

In the book I share my advice and experience working with publishing content to mobile devices from the past decade and discuss what I think will be important in the next decade of mobile and the web.

Even though mobile is one of the fastest growing industries on the planet with things changing every day, I spent a considerable amount of thought and time to try to fill the book with timeless advice that isn't specific to a particular platform or en vogue device.

Read the original book Preface

I wrote this book to have something for everyone interested in designing in developing for mobile devices, regardless of experience and regardless of the application. The first half is a crash course in the mobile ecosystem: how to develop a strategy, address the mobile context—even how to decide which of the multiple mobile application types is best for you, and finally, how to create a user experience for it. The second half is focused on using these principles to make a mobile website or web app.

This means this book isn't for anyone looking for a quick fix to the “mobile problem.” As I told my excellent editorial team throughout the writing process, “this is a book that teaches people how to cook, not a collection of recipes.” However being O'Reilly's first book on mobile, we decided to cover a lot of ground, basically detailing mobile from it's origins to the devices of tomorrow.

I would say about 75-80% of the content of the book (which is some 68,000 words) is up to date and extremely relevant as of March 2011. Not too bad when you consider I began writing some of the chapters within this book over five years ago. In fact there are a number of topics that I discuss in this book that are becoming highly relevant as time goes on.

The purpose of this site is to begin the process of updating content and adding more content and focus around the topic of mobile design, an area that has significantly increased in its importances and relevance, but still understood by very few.

Honestly I have enough information to write an entirely new book just on mobile design, but without some of the other chapters already present in this book, it would feel incomplete. So O'Reilly has been kind enough to allow me to provide the entire text of the original book on this site so I can begin the update process in an iterative fashion.

Updates will be made separately from the original text, keeping the words, flow and spirit of the first edition intact. Being an early adopter myself that last thing I want to do is make the original book obsolete, not to mention undo the amazing work from the first editorial team. The only exception is the breaking up of chapters, and blocks of text to make the book more readable in the CONTEXT! (a key theme of the book)

New content will mostly consist of noting the content that has become obsolete and providing separate sections labeled with a “Revisited” heading that will share some of the changes that had occurred around the particular topic. The majority of updates will be new chapters that explore the complexity and craft of mobile design in new detail, expanding upon the original text.

In a word: Yes! Without people like you buying books like this, people like me can't take time away from our day jobs to write. If authors lose the support of publishers like O'Reilly, knowledge and information will just be randomly thrown about the web without any context at all.

O'Reilly is taking a gamble with me publishing the book here, free for anyone to read. So if you like what you see, please consider supporting other technical authors and publishers by purchasing a digital or physical copy of this book to share with a friend.

Brian Fling