Customer Reviews

Beginning Android (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I had high hopes for this book - I've used many a press books before for picking up new languages and technologies. The book began good and the first couple demos were useful, but then things kind of fell apart.

There are basically two pedagogical approaches that these sorts of books take: teach by example or teach by exercise. In the former, you learn by rote repetition typing of the projects listed -- in the latter you put your knowledge to use by solving instructional problems. Books like these tend towards the former while classroom books tend towards the latter.

This book begins with some teaching by example, showing fully functional code that you can re-create on your own to see how things work. But then after that, he resorts to just showing what is POSSIBLE with Android, but does not provide complete working code. Unless, of course, you count the downloadable code from the a press website, which the author relies heavily on. But if you are simply loading up working code written by someone else, rather than typing it out, there is not much learning happening. (If the author simply wished to save on paper and thus cut costs, perhaps some exercises / practice problems would have been a good substitute)

The book version that I had read used obsolete versions of Android, as well -- and did not use the Eclipse Android Development Toolkit, either.

Considering that this book is listed as "Beginning", one would expect some more hand-holding and less rapid exploration of features. The material is not really arranged in a way that would lend itself to being used a reference book -- it seems to sit square in the middle between pedagogical and referential.

Beginning Android programmers may find better starting material on the android developer site (developer.[...]), or in other books. I do not recommend this one.

A pretty good guide to Android programming. But don't go diving in unless you are quite familiar with the Java programming language. This book says it's for those that are new to Android and "even Java itself", but the author gives no pretense of providing a Java background to the reader. I know some C++, but needless to say I had to hit up Sun's Java Tutorial (online) before I could gain much from this book.

The book is fairly good but Wrox's Professional Android Development is more thorough. I ended up having to buy three chapters from their handy "chapter on demand" ordering system just to fill in gaps in this book.

I was looking for a book on Android to allow me to decide whether to start developing products for it. I generally steer away from "beginning" books as I have been developing in Java for over 10 years. As this was just to get a feel for whether to select Android I decided to look at this book. I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of this book. I will still probably get a more advanced book but this is a very good starting point.

The book covers all the core features of Android, and along with the API docs that come with the SDK you have a very complete set of documentation for a moderately complex project.

Apress is becoming a large part of my technical book collection, and as with the majority this book does not disappoint and I would recommend it as a good overview of the Android development platform.

The author of this book, Mark Murphy, is the premier expert on Android, in my opinion. This book was so helpful to me in learning Android. However it is now out of date: check out the newer books by Mark.

Let's start with a quote from the description.

"This book is aimed at people new to mobile development, perhaps even to Java itself."

No, this book is aimed at people who know what an SDK,XML,manifest, or element is. The author starts out right off the bat talking about all of these things without defining any of them. He "gets in the weeds" of details very quickly, without really explaining what's going on.

Please do not get me wrong, the book is clearly written, but you might want to get a Java programming guide for beginners before buying this book if you have no programming experience.

I find this happens a lot with "beginning" programming books. It's not really written for the person beginning programming, but for the programmer who is just beginning in that particular language. This is fine, but make sure people don't read the instructions thinking they can pick up the book and run, when they've barely done any programming at all.

The book is written well, but because the description is so misleading, I'm forced to give it a low rating.

I used this book while programming my first Android App while in the Borders Cafe. It had by far the best examples of how to use the APIs. It had complete examples, not just snippets of the appropriate classes. This was especially helpful for someone like me who comes from a C/C++ background.

Definitely recommended for new Android programmers