I’m pleased to announce immediate availability of Kindle and Nook editions of Advanced Apex programming. The Kindle edition should also be available on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.it, Amazon.es and, as I understand it, to visitors from India on the main Amazon.com site.

This is the first technical book I published as an eBook, and I found the conversion process to be … interesting. The challenge related to code listings – how do you render listings in a format that can display in multiple resolutions on everything from a desktop to a smartphone? eBooks do support fixed fonts, but many do not support horizontal scrolling, and arbitrary wrapping of code can make it completely unreadable.

After some experimentation, I ended up including the listings as screen captured images from the Force.com IDE. This guaranteed consistent formatting, and allowed me to use a smaller font. It also allowed use of syntax coloring. There are tradeoffs to this approach – for one thing, the code is not text searchable. Use of color also makes the code a bit harder to read on older ePaper devices (like the original Kindles).

If you have a color Kindle or Nook, or one of the newer high-contrast e-paper readers, it should look very good. For older e-paper devices or smaller devices (like Smartphones), you’ll probably want to download the sample code to refer to as you read the book.

For the moment, the Kindle editions are not yet linked to the entries on the print edition on Amazon (that usually takes a few days).

You can find the latest links to purchase here.