Customer Reviews

Beginning Android 2

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I shouldn't be writing a review this early after purchasing as I have not had the opportunity to get through the entire book yet. However, my frustration already is that so far, it seems that you can't come into this a "total newb". an understanding, at least on a basic level of Java would probably make this an easier read? Not sure, but that's my take. In fact i'm on Amazon right now looking for a good beginning book on Java.

Beginning Android 2 looks to be a good book so far, but I think the title "beginning" may be a little of a stretch. Just my take.

The first few chapters of this book show you three wrong ways to do something and then the right way. They code examples get worse as the book goes on. The author spends a lot of time and detail showing you how to do simple layout stuff and then breezes over more complicated subjects. As another reader said, he spends a lot of time tell you things you CAN do with Android, but not explaining them in depth. Also, the code samples you download from the website are SERIOUSLY lacking in useful commenting.

If you're an Android and/or Java beginner, get another book. I have been programming in C# and various forms of Basic for the last 4-5 years and I found this book to be confusing.

Simply put, this book is not very good. The author deals constantly in code snippets without any good explanation of how those snippets line up or even where they go, which means if you don't already know how to program for Android, you'll quickly get lost. If you do already know how to program for Android, then why buy the book?

The author is evidently an experience developer on creating applications for Android 2. With the help of this book, I found the necessary information to get started with Android 2 programming. I especially liked the section that author explained the challenging aspects of Android 2 programming: small screen, limited keyboard, CPU speed, interaction with the phone operation, etc. The book starts with simple applications for input, button click, display results, and layout. Then it did went into a few topics that more advanced: alerts and notifications, how to handle platform changes, etc. Overall, I am pleased with the quality of this title and look forward to read more from the same author.

The book does a decent job exposing many important topics but covers them far too lightly, only giving a brief singular example that leaves many questions unanswered. At best it's a launching point. Programming for Android is complex and requires a book that delves deep, covering all the bases. This book does not.

For those who criticized this book on the basis of "not for beginners". The title of this book is not "Beginning Java", or "Beginning OO", or "Beginning program mining ...", etc. It's "Beginning Android", so it assumes that you already know all of the above.
And, for somebody who already knows the necessary pre-requisites, and needs ready code samples to jump-start his/her new project, this book is perfect.

First off, everyone else is correct about needing to know some Java before picking this book up. Also, this book does NOT walk you through setting up Eclipse which is pretty much REQUIRED before any android programming can take place. But even so, this is not the reason why I rate this book so low.

For every chapter in this book it first gives you a 5 line explanation what a feature is and does and then dumps out the sample code - which is usually 2 or more pages long. No real step-by-step intuitive explanation as to how and why it works. I hate this book and the way it is written. Now.... for plagiarizing it may be good, but I actually want to understand why I am using some classes and methods.

This book is a complete disappointment.