They are both absolutely wonderful books and if you are goign to do any
serious CF development, they're both well worth the money.
I wouldn't characterize on as being more complete than the other. Dan and
Larry's book is a little more example driven whereas Andy and Stephen's book
is more reference driven. They both have a lot of great examples and they
both have a good amount of background info. The first one is a bit longer
mainly b/c the of the examples and some cool stuff in the appendicies. I
owe the authors of both of those books quite a bit. There are a few other
things you may be interested in though...
Dan Fox and Jon Box has a book title Building Solutions with the Microsoft
..NET Compact Framework that's a great read. It's definitely smaller than
the other two but the authors do a great job at getting their points across
in a clear and concise manner. Well worth every penny.
Also Paul Yao and David Durant have a book coming out that's by far the
biggest book on the compact framework (and perhaps the largest book ever
written) . Paul has a bunch of the chapters over on his web site
www.paulyao.com at this link
http://www.paulyao.com/cfbook/index.asp .
I've been lucky enough to get a review draft of the book and it's an
impressive piece of work - the attention to detail in their is nothing short
of amazing.
Also, if you read Doug Boiling's Windows CE programming book, the third
edition covers the Compact Framework. Granted it's not exclusively a CF
book, but Doug is an impressive author and the discussion of the CF more
than justifies the price of the book even if you aren't interested in the
other material.
Rob Tiffany has a SQL Server CE /Compact Framework book that's indispensable
if you plan on using SQL Server CE. All of the above books discuss CE to
some degree or another, but Rob's book is dedicated to it exclusively.
In a nutshell, all of the CF authors above have a ton of talent both as
developers and writers and you won't be disappointed with a purchase of any
of those titles. (Here are a few reviews on them
http://www.devbuzz.com/content/books.asp)
Finally, if you haven't already been over there, you check out
www.opennetcf.org . There's a code library for just about every task you'll
face as a CF developer and the source is available. As such, it can serve
as a superb learninng tool in and of itself.
Good Luck,
Bill
--
W.G. Ryan MVP Windows - Embedded
www.devbuzz.com
www.knowdotnet.com
http://www.msmvps.com/williamryan/