18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So far so good, May 17, 2010
This review is from: Beginning Android 2 (Paperback)
I just recently bought this book and it is a solid introduction to Android. However, please understand that this book makes 2 assumptions:
1. You have a decent understanding of how to code Java SE and OO concepts such as inheritance, encapsulation, etc.
2. You have already set up your Android environment be it via command line or through Eclipse.
If your experience is like mine you probably will use a little of both types of setups to get things going. I found the eclipse simulator set up horribly slow to boot up once you have created it using eclipse. I had to use the command line version to see code I ran.
With that said I think this book provides a nice start and covers enough topics to give you at least a taste of what Android can do. I will buy the follow up Pro Android 2 once I have completed this book. This book flows pretty quickly and is small (370 or so pages) compared to most books like this that can easily go above and beyond 700 pages.
Again if you have a decent grasp of Java and OO concepts, I would suggest trying this book out if you are interested in trying your hand at Android 2 development.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
This book feels rushed, October 10, 2010
This review is from: Beginning Android 2 (Paperback)
I am a software engineer with 15 years experience in C++/Java and hold several Sun Java certifications. I was looking for a way to fast track my understanding of Android development.
This book is not a reference, and neither is it a tutorial. I would call it a "discussion" of beginning Android development.
The first half of book (chapters 1-14) are a description of the ADT UI elements. The book starts to get interesting in chapter 15-21 with a brief description of multithreading and life cycle events. The remaining chapters are a survey of parts of the SDK or related development technologies.
The first major problem with this book is his use of "conversational" subheadings. As you wade into a chapter, rather than tell you what each section is about, he gives you a "clever" subheading like "Forcing the issue" or "Making sense of it all" or "String Theory" or "Got the Picture" or "Getting What you Want". These headings do not let you know what you are reading about and detract from the experience. It just reads very poorly for a technology book.
Another problem is that there are no diagrams. EVERY picture in the book is just a screenshot, either of an Android Device or of a development tool, usually just showing the UI element being discussed.
My final complaint is that none of the examples load into Eclipse. They are provided on the web site with a readme that states you have to load individual resources into projects that you create. Would it have been difficult for him to spend the 2 hours to create individual projects for each, instead of requiring every user to do this for himself?
So what you get is 15 chapters of "this is a text box, this is a list", that are of little value over the online tutorials. Because the code samples do not load into Eclipse, it requires a bit of leg work to get them into your IDE so the code snippets might be useful. You then get 5 chapters on threads and events, and the remaining 20 chapters are a survey of Android technologies.
As a software developer, I found the book simultaneously too easy (15 chapters of UI elements?), yet unweildy.
I have headed back to the online tutorials and when I have obtained what I am looking for, may return to this book for supplemental material.
I really wanted to give this book a good review. The author's credentials are great, it just seems like very little work went into this book.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Learning Android at the Perfect Pace, June 17, 2010
This review is from: Beginning Android 2 (Paperback)
This book is definitely for someone that has some experience with Java. I bought this book, because of the other reader's comments. I enjoyed the fact that this books wastes no time diving straight into your first Android project rather than wasting time reviewing Java syntax. After two days of reading this book, I was able to create a nice UI using XML layouts, communicate with my REST web services on the Internet, and store user data in SQLite.
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