Android Application Development For Dummies [Paperback]

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies; 1 edition (December 7, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 047077018X
• ISBN-13: 978-0470770184
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  

By : Donn Felker
Price : $19.79
You Save : $10.20 (34%)

Customer Reviews

I'm going to preface this review by saying that I have been programming for about 15 years, and have been working professionally as a developer for almost 3 years. My background is in VB, C, Javascript, HTML, and even a little dabbling in C/C++. With that in mind, my Java knowledge was essentially everything I had learned from C (which is very similar), and the tutorials on Google's Android development website. You could argue Javascript may help, but they're so different that I don't think it counts as experience.
I finished all of the tutorials on Google's site and still felt like I wasn't really grasping the concept of Android development. For those of you who have developed in C/VB for Windows or Windows Mobile, you may understand what I mean when I say that going from something so straight-forward as using Visual Studio and .NET languages to something a little more complex and code-heavy like C++ or Java while using an unfamiliar IDE like Eclipse can be a little daunting at first. Google's tutorials, while full of great examples, don't really take the time to explain the "why" and then "what" of Android development, and instead have a more confusing approach of "Step 1: Type all this code in; Step 2: That code you just type does [this]; Step 3: Run your application".
The first half of this book is incredibly informative, and after reading only a couple short paragraphs on things I've already tried to learn and failed, I really understood it this time. The author's tone and descriptions make even the most complicated topics very easy to understand. The author also likes to commonly encourage the reader, writing that we are "experts", and making assumptions that we understand what we just read, even after it was some insanely complicated thing that was described in detail across four pages. It seems like this approach might be little odd, but I liked it. It kept my confidence up as I was reading.
The second half of the book, while also great, starts a little on the fast track. There are other reviews that mention this, and although I partially agree, it's also worth mentioning that a lot of the things that are flown through quickly come together a little later in the book. However, the pace does seem to go from a "one line at a time" methodology into a "type these 60 lines of code in and I'll explain it later" sort of teaching. While I don't prefer this, and I think it's a bit messy, the information IS there; it's just harder to soak it all in than it was in the first half of the book. The application you are building at the end is quite large, and I have tried to think of an easier way the author could have filled me with the knowledge instead of the approach taken, but I really couldn't think of a better way, mainly due to the way the code has to be written for the particular task at hand.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I think it was a great introduction to Android development, and is leaps and bounds above Google's documentation, at least for a beginner. I wish the book was a little longer, and I wish the author didn't frequently say things like "I could write an entire book on [subject], so I won't go into detail about this. If you want to learn more, read the documentation at [Google link]." For these reasons, I gave it four stars instead of five. The fundamentals do exist in this book, but I would have liked to have seen more.
I would recommend this book for anyone with any sort of programming background looking to get into Android development. I would probably not recommend it to someone who has no programming background whatsoever.

I have the Nook version, but I wanted a version to be able to thumb through and set bookmarks and grab it from the shelf during development, therefore I bought a hard copy as well. Great examples of working with SQLite and nice intro to Services with the IntentService. Definately recommend this for anyone like me (new to android dev). I really like how in depth the author is with helping me understand intents and the system behind them that runs android. Great stuff!

Related Product

Beginning Android Application Development (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) [Paperback]

Programming Android [Paperback]

View

Beginning Android Application Development (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

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!

Related Product

Programming Android [Paperback]

View

Programming Android [Paperback]

Product Details

• Paperback: 502 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (August 5, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1449389694
• ISBN-13: 978-1449389697
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  

By : Zigurd Mednieks
Price : $26.99
You Save : $18.00 (40%)

Customer Reviews

I had a need for using Android in a research setting for advanced
mobile networking. Though I have a strong Java and mobile programming
background, I have no familiarity with Android. I needed to get up
to speed quickly, and thought I would go with an OReilly book, usually
a good bet.
I ended up using the intro to quickly
get started with eclipse, and then moved into the view section to put
together an interface without much trouble (useful examples),
and am looking at the
advanced sections to learn about Android's NFC feature. The 3rd
section is enlightening, saving me from some design mistakes that I was
sure to make. I did, however, feel that some of the information in the
later chapters was over
my head, targeted at an audience with more outside knowledge.
Overall, the book is both good at introducing the basics of Android,
and covering the more advanced topics.

This book goes past the basics and provides a deeper level of understading of every topic it touches. It has a particular focus on how Android's data archiecture provides a model for apps that use a Web service, improving apperent
performance and presentation of data.
It is also the first in-depth book to cover Fragment and related classes that go into making Android tablet user interfaces. Additionally, it covers the compatibility library that enables running Fragment-based UIs on pre-Honeycomb versions of Android.

View