Customer Reviews

Professional Android 2 Application Development (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Android 2 is pretty new (as of March 2010) so having an Android 2 book on the market that is good quality was unexpected. I have not read all chapters, but here are my impressions so far:

Pro's
=====
- Author's style is neither dull or exciting, just to the point. Most explanations are clear and thorough.
- I definitely feel I have a good resource to complement the online Android docs. There have been a variety of topics I've tried to answer using Android docs (and Google searches) without much luck that this book covered clearly.
- There are a lot of good topics covered. Space is not wasted on reprinting information readily available online. Instead, author regularly refers reader to web links.
- And, finally, I appreciate the well-edited index.

Con's
=====
- The book is very weak in the illustration department. For example, instead of showing an image of a NinePatch bitmap, the author explains how a NinePatch should be constructed. This is chintzy and unforgivable for a book about a heavily visual technology.
- Occassionally, concepts are introduced without providing context. 'Kinda like when you walk into a meeting and the speakers clearly know their material but forget that 90% of the others in the room need to be brought up to speed before instructing.
- Some conspicuous omissions. For instance, no information on fonts.

I'm a software engineer with 3 years of experience developing Windows Mobile applications.
I needed a book which is
* In-Depth - Perhaps one of the most in-depth Android books available.
* Updated - This book is one of the most updated books on Android, covering Android SDK 2.1 r1.
* Lots of sample code to complement the shortcomings of the online Android Developer Guide.
This book meets all of my requirements.

Being a careful reader, I found many errors just by reading Chapters 3 and 5 alone.
I've posted these errors on publisher's errata page and also on this book's forum.
No book is perfect, therefore misspellings and misprints are tolerable.
But incorrect or outdated information is not, therefore I hope the author can correct
these errors in the next print.

Depite these errors, I still give this book a rating of 4 because of other qualities, and the
author was very keen to address these errors.
Just like reading any other books, one just needs to be careful in reading, perhaps the best approach is
to read it along with the online Android Developer Guide.

I only started writing Android apps back in November of 2009. In that time, I've been under the false assumption that everything I need, I'll be able to find online.

Although it's probably true that a lot of the information in here can be found online, the real benefit to Meier's book is that it's very well organized. I didn't realize how disorganized I was until I decided to get this book. It is pretty easy to understand and makes a great reference.

Anyway, I keep hearing about how this book is great if you have a lot of experience, but I just wanted to say it's great if you don't have any experience, too.

There were mixed reviews on this book, but I decided to give it a try since some of the bad reviews were from people with limited programming experience. I have more than 20 yrs of programming and applications development experience, but there are way too many errors in the book. I had to spend far too much time researching the errors in the book. This book was a total disappointment to me.

In short, if you are looking to learn Android programming, I would look elsewhere.

At the beginning of the book, the author states that "while knowledge of JAVA is helpful, it's not a necessity", and yet the VERY FIRST program in the book will not work if you type it in - he left off the import statements. I found a lot of the code wouldn't work, and even the examples on the WROX site wouldn't even compile in several cases. If you check out the forum on the book on WROX's site you will see others had issues here as well. It's one thing if perhaps there was an error in the code in the book but quite another when they didn't even take the time to check the code they posted online to see if it would compile.

The organization of the book just seems off. He meanders around instead of having a good path for learning. After so many code errors, everything I read, I read with a tingling of "I wonder if this works or is true?" in the back of my mind.

I would not recommend this book to those new to Android programming, and because of the errors would have a hard time recommending it as a reference book. I used to love Wrox books - most of my programming library was red - but it seems as though the quality of them has suffered as of late.

I am beginning to believe this book is not for me. I am writing this review after 2 hours of deep frustration.

The structure of the book assumes that you work through it in one direction start to finish in order to understand concepts. In so doing later examples build on earlier ones and explanations of later concepts refer back to the earlier time you encountered it. This allows a couple of complex applications to be created, but at the expense of the later examples standing alone. As you go further into the book, you just get short code snippets (which would not be so bad if supplemented by more complete download code). What I want to know is how to do x,y or z in isolation and fill in gaps later myself.

Case in point:
I had some time so thought I might try something easy. The problem I want to solve? I want to fill the screen with a single color. Listing 4-17 is a good enough match for what I want to do. However, it needs to be wrapped by the application somehow. So I am having to re-read the whole of the previous 111 pages to work out exactly how to do that. The wrox downloads just give the xml without any package and my hamfisted attempts at setting a view have been unproductive. My main beef here is that there is a gap between listing 4-17 and figure 4-3 - that is, the application code to do it is missing. I'm sure it's no more than a dozen lines which, once I see it I'll be able to generalize.

This is not the first time I've had this sort of experience from this book.

If you're the sort of person who can work through 500+ pages more or less linearly, then maybe this will be a better fit for you than for me.

PS:
The simple answer is to not attempt to use drawable, but to add android:background="#RRGGBB" to the main.xml, but this won't cover the whole screen.
PPS:
I returned to the problem for about 90 minutes after writing this review. In that time I have: changed the background programmatically; turned off the title bar, set the window to full screen, implemented an OnClickListener - then changed my mind and implemented an OnTouchListener and implemented some custom colors. ie: learnt all of these things (well, adding the colors I probably already knew). For the first couple I tried using the book, but ended up getting everything I needed off the internet.
My informal score: Web: 6, book:0

PPPS [Dec 2010]:
From time to time I foolishly return to this book in an hour of need only to have my hopes dashed. I should throw it out so I am no longer tempted. Most recently I'm trying to figure out how to delete an item in a database which has been adapted via a listview. The example in the book (the todo list) says (at chapter 7 12.2):

// "Items are added to the listview in reverse order, so invert the index.
toDoDBAdapter.removeTask(todoItems.size() - _index);

This works. However it _only works the first time_, after which the database rows are out of sync with the rows in the list view. You need to manage the rowIds yourself (apparently a simplecursoradapter may serve the same purpose).

PPPPS [Feb 2011]
A good place to start learning is to find a project at [...], download the source and review how they've done it.

I am half way through this book and I am really glad I purchased it. I tried to learn from the Android Developers site prior to purchasing this book, but I couldn't learn very efficiently from the website. There are only few sample codes with explanations available, and the contents provided on the website are usually not covered in depth. This book covers wide range of topics in depth, and provides plethora of sample codes so you can practice developing application from scratch.

There are, however, many errors on the text. Some of the sample apps doesn't run like they are supposed to, and often times I have to run the Eclipse's debugger to figure out why the app crashed during the run-time. However, I feel that debugging really helped me to understand the application in depth. Actually I think I learned more from debugging broken codes than from reading the text. I am very sure that the author did not put buggy codes in there to help us practice some application debugging skill, but I am glad I got some debugging practice. As a matter of fact, when you start developing application of your own, you would encounter countless bugs and you would have to fix it on your own. I did get frustrated at some of the typos and that is why the rating is 4 and not 5, but I do think that you can use the errors on the text to your advantages by practicing some debugging.

Overall it is a good book for a beginner in Android App Development.

P.S. In order to understand the materials covered in the book completely and in depth, Java and Object-Oriented Programming knowledge is essential.

A great ressource for any android programmer. This is espacially a very good book to understand the possibilities of the android platform. I especially enjoy explanations for Geocoding and Located Based Services. And the author really have hard knowledge about the Android framework and device like toast layer, or widget on top level. The last chapter is excellent example to enforcing permissions from Linux Kernel Security. good idea from the author !
I recommends 5 stars to this excellent book ! a must-have !

I needed a quick primer on Android development. I have to say, "I really enjoyed this book." I'm reading it twice. Here is why.

I installed Eclipse and the Android SDK. I worked through all the examples in the book and I got all of them to work. Sure there were some small bugs and omissions here and there. But I was able to debug those and/or consult the errata on the Wrox website. As a result, I learned something in the process. But there was so much information, that I have to read it twice to absorb it, and then I still won't remember everything. It should be a great reference later.

I think the first ten chapters of the book provided great information. The remaining chapters were a little light on details. But the book would have been much longer, and more expensive, if that was the case.

It is an excellent book for someone who is interested and new to developing mobile applications on Google's Android platform. The author is very knowledgeable and has done a thorough coverage on the subject with examples that provide hands-on experience to the reader. I am glad that I purchased this book.