Customer Reviews

Android Application Development: Programming with the Google SDK

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I was expecting a lot more from this book, considering my respect for ORA. I was expecting something with the rigor of K&R and got something on par with "... For Dummies". The book presents the obligatory "hello world", discusses it briefly, and then plops a fully complete application on the reader's lap. Instead of building the application up from the ground, the book explains how the full application works. I'm not a neophyte developer; I could garner the same knowledge from looking at one of the open source Android applications (like the many apps in the source tree). I was hoping for a walkthrough for an unfamiliar environment, but rather received a technical review of a finished application. Most unhelpful. Here's hoping ORA realizes how this book failed and reinvent it in a second edition.

I usually swear by OReilly books, but this one just doesn't cut it. This book is only really useful for an absolute beginner and should probably be titled "Learning Android". Even so, it still isn't very high quality. There is away too much information about just setting up the development environment. Very disappointing. If you are looking for a desk reference for Android, look elsewhere.

I am an avid Oreilly fan. I write software in a number of different languages and environments. This has got to be the absolute worst coverage of android I've seen. It was less informative than the books covering beta releases. There are typos, not just normal sentence typos but method signatures in the examples. You'd think as late as this book is there'd be none of that. I feel pretty ripped off having bought this book.

Look, the book is not spectacular and the ratings of other reviewers proves this. I found the book just about "OK" too.

This book is useful to read in conjunction with another book on Android. The advantage of this book is that it gives a good 20,000 ft in the sky overview of the Android system. So while the other book might be plodding through the fundamentals and concepts, this book takes you on a nice journey within Android. Think of it as a novel.

BTW some reviewers have criticized the inordinate time the book spends on explaining the Android Eclipse IDE. I actually think thats a good thing.

Summary: You can't learn Android programming by reading this book. Buy it in case you want an overview of Android.

Reading previous reviews, my initial impressions were that the book wouldn't live up to the description. In contrast, I found the book to be a good introduction to the platform and to specific requirements for building an Android application.

The book starts by explaining how to set up your system for development of Android applications with Eclipse. The information was correct and made no assumptions as to your previous exposure to Eclipse. While most of this information is available from the Android Developers site ([..]), it did go a step further and explain the layout of the Eclipse IDE. This includes portions directly related to Google's plugins.

Unfortunately this good section was followed by downloading and installing the MJAndroid project. The project doesn't work. Like many other reviewers, I was able to download and compile the project, but it wouldn't run in the emulator, without giving fatal errors. Given that this was the example project for the book, this was a major strike against the it.

The book proceeded to explain various portions of the project and how they relate to the topic at hand. While the explanations of each section of an Application was quite good, doing a good job of helping me to understand the subjects, the code in the downloaded application didn't match what was printed in the book. It appeared as if the authors were continuing to make changes to the code (for a new edition maybe) and publishing them. Steps should have been taken to freeze the code and make it clear to readers what should be downloaded. This may be the reason the code wasn't able run on the emulator.

Finally, time is taken to explore how an application is published and what must be done to submit to the App store, the Google APIs, and interacting with databases telephony, and Inter-Process Communication. These were some of the best chapters in the book.

Overall, if a second edition is planned, I would likely read it, especially given the smaller size of the book. The explanations of each section were great. The only overshadowing issue being that the example code didn't match the actual code, and that it didn't run on the emulator. My one request for a future edition would be to add a section on interacting with web services and parsing of XML and JSON. And again, thanks to the authors for not basing the entire book around the creation of a game. My vote, 3 stars. It is worth the read if you have a Safari sub.

I purchased this book in order to learn development for Android. After spending a lot of time confused between this book and the SDK I downloaded, I logged on to O'Reillys website to find the examples from the book are no longer available. Nor is this book. I emailed them to find out that this was deprecated a while ago because it is written to talk about the SDK for Version 1.1. It was pulled for the version written for 1.6. (Which is almost deprecated now) So, this book is only a book for you if you are building for Android 1.1 -> 1.4.

It's too detailed to be high-level overview for Android platform, but too high-level to be a development guide. Most of information in the book is available at android site - the book doesn't add more value.
On top of that - I was unable to run provided MJAndroid example which is used across all the book.
Overall impression - frustrated :(

I've recently started deep-diving into Java-based mobile application development environments heads-first - without air-tanks. I'm also a happy Android user.

For one of the environments, Blackberry, I took the "All-Google-All-The-Time-Search" approach. While I am getting an application developed out of it, there was no reference points to figure out what basic search terms were actually useful. I'm still learning how much more of that onion remains to be peeled in order to get to the truly useful search terms and the resulting information, creating a lot of tears in the process.

For upcoming Android development, I find myself "done" with the above approach. Towards this end, this book is very helpful in understanding what capabilities there are for Android and the differences in putting the different capabilities together to create a mobile app, such as persistence, inter-process communications, and other gotchas between environments. This is also extremely useful for porting between different mobile devices, which is also becoming extremely useful. The actual collating of the examples and the presentations in this book on how to think "Android development" are invaluable to orientating and honing in the future search terms for picking up the rest of the reference-type details.

I do agree with some of the other reviews that adding an overview of 1.5 might have been helpful. However, many of us are used to this lag in printed books, which does not detract from this book's value. For example, I and other professionals bought books about Spring 1 when Spring 2 was the current released version. The key point is that the vast majority of the information in this book still applies.

All in all, a worthy addition to the Android developer toolkit!

I was also expecting a book covering all functionalities of Android in a structured way. Finding things here is very difficult. I have learnt more from forums and Google site than reading this book for sure...

Whatever your Android programming level is, this book is a complete waste of time and definitely doesn't worth a single penny. After reading half of the book it was very clear to me that there is no leading author for this book and nobody technically reviewed the book as a whole. Except chapter 7, referring to signing and publishing Android application, the whole part one is useless. Whole Android installation process is different right now and you better check Google web site to get latest installation steps. Not to mention that there are unnecessary and very annoying repetitions on how to use Eclipse.
Even if first part was disastrous, I did finish the book. In second part there are two chapters that are worth spending your time on: chapter 10: Building a View and chapter 13: Inter-process Communication. As for the rest....utterly disappointing. The authors even prove that they don't know what application they wrote. In some chapters they use different names for same class they put in their application, this in addition to the fact that their application doesn't work at all.
If you receive this book as a present and you are completely bored you can read it, otherwise I would not spend a single penny on it.