Beginning Android Application Development (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Product Details

Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (April 19, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1118017110
ISBN-13: 978-1118017111
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

By : Wei-Meng Lee
List Price : ~~$39.99~~
Price : $24.34
You Save : $15.65 (39%)

Customer Reviews

This book has broken the ice on Android development for me. After floundering for a while with spotty tutorials on the web, I realized I'd need a book and picked this one basically because it was one of the newer ones.
I started stepping through the book page by page and following the samples. By around the middle of chapter 3 I was able to break away and start coding my own app and just flipped to the sections of the book I needed for specific advice after that.
The tutorials are good. Straight to the point without the dead weight that plagues so many web samples (where all too often I found a sample that did the 1 thing I wanted and 15 things I didn't, which just created confusion). This book gives you the full code and then goes to a "How It Works" section that goes through the code bit by bit explaining what the different pieces do. That has been an immense help and there's nothing this book covers that left me with any doubt on how to do it.
It's still "Beginning" Android development because it's mostly covering the basics. Lots of options are not covered, but then, that would take another 500 pages. This book will get things functional to the point that if you want to do something more advanced, you'll likely be able to fill in the gaps with the official Android documentation online.
One mark I will put against the book: it did not cover widgets. Still, after using the book to create my widget as an app, I had enough understanding of what was going on that I was able to convert my app to a widget with the help of some online docs (which I previously was not able to make sense of).
Note that the book does not teach you Java. I have never programmed in Java before, though I've used C, C++ and C, which is similar. Search Google for "Trail: Learning the Java Language" and that will take you to the Oracle site. Between that tutorial and this book, I was able to go from a complete Android novice to putting my first small app on the Market in about a week.

I have a collection of several other android books that jump around and do not explain things thorough so that a new programmer can understand. I purchased this book and it is by far the best one yet! Wei-Meng Lee is gifted in his style of writing. It is easy to follow and understand. I am so excited to finish going through the rest of the book. I highly recommend that if you are only going to get one book, this is it. Thanks for such a wonderful product!