Customer Reviews

Pro Android 2

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Pro Android 2 is aimed at developers who want to take Android to the next level. This large book serves as a manual for how to do almost anything on Android. The book starts by giving a refresher of the platform, and then quickly dives into explaining XML files, GUI layout and Views, and working with mapping. Building and consuming services are explained, giving the first example of working with Apache's HttpClient libs that I have seen in an Android book. Examples of working with the Telephony API, searching, using gestures, you name it. The book even offers an alternative way of creating applications using Titanium Mobile. Finally time is spent explaining the Android Marketplace and things you should know before making your application public.

The information contained in this book is at the same time enlightening and overwhelming. In just the first few chapters, I had already found better ways to handle several things in my own Android applications. That alone was worth the time spent reading this book.

Although the book was written by three different authors, I found the writing style and flow of the book well done and congruous.

The book explains that the intended audience should have previous exposure to developing on the Android platform and to Java, and they mean it. While an introduction is given to the various parts of an Android application, a new developer wouldn't be able to get enough understanding to use this book as a starting point for developing Android applications. Previous exposure to any number of beginning Android books is recommended before you attempt to tackle this one. The publisher suggest you start with Beginning Android 2.

If you are an Android developer, do yourself a favor and pick up this book. If you spend 2 minutes flipping through the various chapters, I promise you will walk out of the book store with Pro Android 2 in hand. My rating, 5 stars. The book delivers exactly what it advertises and does so in a manner that is enjoyable to read and very helpful.

In my opinion, one of the weaknesses of the Android documentation from Google is that is does not highlight the associated components of the Android Operating System. Pro Android 2 provides those high level connections and provides real depth into the various parts of the API.

I found the coverage of the Android Platform, in the context of the evolution of computing, to be particularly insightful and engaging. And they quickly transition into an in depth explanation of what you will need to build real applications.

The chapter exploring the Structure of an Android Application clearly illustrates how the different development assets are wired together by the runtime. The chapters describing the OOB widgets, menus and layout are both very complete and easy to understand.

I was especially excited to read the sections on more advanced topics, including OpenGL, 2D Animations, and even WebKit / Titanium hybrid development.

Outstanding book!

This book is a great resource for developers that are new to Android programming. I had never built a droid app before. With this book, I was able to get up and running very quickly. The examples are excellent and the foundation that this book provides is invaluable. It covers all of the topics for virtually any application need, and then describes in detail how to get your new app on the market.

The book is extensive and covers a lot of material. However, about half of the examples don't work. The sample code that you can download from the book's web site doesn't import into Eclipse and the samples aren't the book examples anyway. I learn by taking something that works and extending the sample; if you learn like I do you'll be a little disappointed.

I see from the book's website, [...], that Pro Android 3 is in the works. I suggest they actually build the examples of the code they show in the book. It's clear they didn't build their own examples.

It is truly unbelievable books like this one get published. The code in the book is horrible, much of it does not even compile, let alone run. As a professional developer, how often can you break the build before you're put on notice? Before you're shown the door? Some figures are low-res gibberish where you can't make out the text - how does that get past quality control? Pp. 33-47 appear twice. More importantly, the book thoroughly lacks in examples where the reader is invited to sequentially implement a given set of tasks. It's more like "here is some code, here's what it does". What do I do with it? Where do I plug it in? The section on content providers is a real gem. Here, they are talking about the code in the notepad app in the Android samples (freely available on the net). Well, there happens to be a Notepad tutorial on the Android site, complete with step-by-step instructions, code explanations, and solutions. It also happens to be correct and well written. Authors, when you butcher someone else's perfectly good tutorial, at least don't confuse the reader more than the original text does. Actually, in this case the original text is quite clear, it's the butchered version that's worthless. One good chapter in the book, the one on how to set up the dev environment. But alas, the Android site has that as well. So, to someone considering buying this book, go over to [...] first, spend a couple of days there, then see if you really need a book. This is coming from someone who usually starts with a book. It's just that for some reason, the two Android books I attempted to use were worthless.

I must totally agree with my previous reviewer "Yue Gao".

This book rarely explains to you, how to do something. (Like to build the notepad app from the ground up to learn android app programming bit for bit.) It rather throws the whole finished application at you and forces you to read through a lot of code.

Note: The resources section at the []-website also covers the notepad-example in a tutorial and made it a step-by-step tutorial. It's obvious that with this approach more of the fundamentals will stick to your brain.

After that I wondered why I even bought the book. - Most of the time I was better of, re-reading the adressed stuff at the dev-guide to make it clearer.

Good Android books are hard -- make that impossible -- to find. I've looked at several, and Pro Android 2 seems to be the best of the lot. Not great, but tolerable.

[Update:]

Well, I'm knocking it down a notch. Not "tolerable" but maybe "not totally toxic". Can't go to 1 star since most other books are worse, but consider it a star and a half.

The reason is that the authors wrote the tutorial code for Dialogs and wrote the text surrounding it without testing the code first. When they discovered the code didn't work (apparently late in the editing process) they wrote "you will notice that the prompt dialog always returns null even if the user enters text into it", and acted like this was what they had intended to demonstrate. But when they tried to explain how the code was wrong they got the explanation wrong, and never provided the "corrected" example. It was clear that they completely misunderstood how Dialogs work, and didn't really know how to provide a corrected example.

I am a firm believer in bootstrapping. I want to be up and coding in a new language as fast as possible. On that front especially this book delivers! They take the time to walk you through everything from environment setup to animation. No matter what kind of Android app you want to build, this book is your springboard. Reasonable depth, and impressive breadth, this one's a winner!

The book tends to provide examples first and then discuss the concepts after what has been presented. (Which can sometimes work, but doesn't here because the concepts like intents and activites are fairly new to Java coders.) It allows you to see how it is used first, and then go back and figure out why it is used in that manner. It's a lot like reverse engineering code. This requires that you have a good grasp of Java before starting this book. The rev eng does give you a sense of accomplishment because you're reading android code, but without the concepts it's just cookbook programming (not real understanding). However, I keep finding myself re-reading sections, because once the concept is explained then I go back to the beginning to see how it was used. (Resulting in reading each chapter twice, and this is a 700 page book.)

The most frustrating thing for me in reading this book is that the examples use deprecated classes. (e.g. Chapter 3: Contacts.People class is used in the examples, but this class has been deprecated and replaced with the new ContactsContract class which is very different and not discussed in the book.)

It's one thing to demonstrate a concept, but they really need to keep the book up to date. I keep having to go to the Android SDK on the web to review the new classes which are not covered in this book which I could have done with out paying $50 for this book.

The source code is just bad! Instead of full, downloadable projects - the source code is just a text version of the snipits you see in the book. One of the most valuable parts of a book like this is to be able to quickly get an example and fiddle with it. There is no easy way to take what is in the book and turn it into something useful! I wish I had purchased a different Android book.

Take a look at the source code yourself. [...]