I've just finished reading Funambol Mobile Open Source by Stefano Fornari. I already knew a good deal about Funambol servers and setup prior to reading this book, but I have to say this book would definitely have made my own learning curve a lot easier.

The author does a good job of providing both a beginners perspective and touching lightly on some advanced topics. It begins by chronicling the installation and setup of a fictional user "Maria" as she goes from simply syncing her local desktop to a newly installed Funambol server to a full fledged enterprise environment with hundreds of users.

It covers both Windows and Linux installations and several mobile devices as well including both the Blackberry and the iPhone. It doesn't go into great detail on any one mobile device. I would have preferred to see a bit more detail regarding both the Blackberry and the iPhone considering their prevalence in the market, but he does a good job of at least getting you started with both.

I'm in the process of reading two new books and will be posting reviews on them in a few days. The first is OpenX Ad Server: Beginner's Guide. A sample chapter is available online. We'll see if it lives up to it's name because despite my technical knowledge and Linux experience I've never used or even looked closely at the OpenX ad server.

I'll also be taking a look at Funambol Mobile Open Source. Here's another sample chapter. This one will be interesting because I already run a Funambol server and I have to admit that scraping together the necessary information to implement it without any printed material was a bit of a challenge.

Both books are recent publications from Packt Publishing. Packt specializes in books that cover beginner to seriously advanced computer systems management and development topics, and include quite a few that cover open-source software. My team here already used their RESTful PHP Web Services book when we were developing some backend solutions for the office, and found it to be a great primer on the topic.