Customer Reviews

The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is better than wading through the online docs, but not by a lot. I didn't like the author's informal voice, and the index is pretty bad. Instead, I'd suggest Professional Android Application Development (Wrox Programmer to Programmer), which I rely on heavily.

If you're new to mobile development or new to cell phone development, The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development will get you started fast. It covers all of the basics, and gets you far enough to be able to be productive using Google's documentation. What more could you ask?

I've gone through the majority of android books out there. This one (and the other one from commonsware) are clearly the best and end up getting used probably more than the others combined.

I first bought Professional Android Application Development and thought it was pretty good as I went through it. However I realized when I started trying to write my own apps that there were huge areas left uncovered in that book. I turned to the online docs but found them to be very skimpy and had several problems I was just stuck with.

Out of desperation I bought this book and have found its coverage to be much much more detailed and helpful than either the online docs or my first Android book.

I think for people who really want to dig below the surface and do more than just simple toy examples, some additional help is needed and this book seems perfect.

This book provides a great way to learn the android SDK. Coupled with the Google online documentation and Google Groups (android beginners & developers), this combination makes fast work of most learning challenges. I've found this book invaluable as an immediate reference, and rarely needed to ask others for help because of it. The author is also quite active in giving assistance to subscribers when they need some clarification of the code.

This book has more than paid for itself in the time I've saved looking for answers online. I can't praise it enough. Not to mention the fact that I've already downloaded the early release of the Advanced Android book as well!

This book and the series are probably the best books out there. I had read 6 other books and waded through the online reference, but after getting ahold of this book and its associated books I learned so much more and a lot of it comes from how the material is presented. The online reference without a point of reference left me scratching my head after reading these books even though a year old on the shelfs tought me more in a weekend then I learned with other books over 3 months. Online material is so sketchy and usually posted by amatuers that this book really helped to find the problems and solutions that I had never realized.

I have been using Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development when I want to reference how to implement certain features in Android. I read the relevant chapter and sometimes look at the source code that goes with the chapter. The book is well written and much easier to understand than the reference material at the Google Android website.

I highly recommend this book for anyone trying to learn Android.

I ordered the online subscription, and have to say that the CommonsWare Android books are the most straightforward Android books I have seen. The writing style is good, and the examples are presented very well. I would definitely recommend these to anyone starting out with Android development.

However, one of the main reasons I purchased the books was because I was not sure how to properly handle threading, and background tasks within an Activity, and could not find any sufficient material online. Do I use a Handler, AsyncTask, etc? When do I use one over the other? Now while this is covered in chapter 15, I still feel as though I did not get all my answers, or enough to even make an educated decision. The chapter mentions how the AsyncTask uses three data types, but then proceeds to use null for two of those, thereby not giving me any clue as to how to use them properly.

Also, the discussion of Handlers mentions that both messages and Runnable objects can be used, but only covers Runnables in one small paragraph.

Additionally, the examples used are not realistic at all. I would love to see an example to do a common task, like periodically polling a URL in the background thread and updating the UI.

Book is easy to read even for non native English speaker like me. There is a lot of good samples. Code is fore SDK 1.0. Now we have 1.5, but other Android's books are more out of date. It's also important Mark Murphy is active posting on android developers group and his post are often very helpful.

This book has already been useful for solving problems I was experiencing during application development. It's well written, easily understood, and clearly will help anyone attempting to do Android Application development, and the product level or OEM level. It is NOT an instruction on the inner workings of Android, and as Google advances every day, I wonder if such a book could even be up to date.

Regardless, I found this book helpful, and am glad I purchased it. I would definitely recommend it. A few caveats: I would prefer a more detailed index section, but was able to find what I needed regardless. Furthermore, this is not an instructional on JAVA. You will need a thorough introduction to JAVA to succeed in App development on Android.