Customer Reviews

Unlocking Android: A Developer's Guide

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

 

 

This is a must have book for anybody doing Android development. It is definitely targeted at developers who are new to Android -- which describes most Android developers out there given what a new platform it is. However, the level of depth on many topics and the clarity provided behind many key concepts in Android are so well done that this book will benefit anyone working on Android applications.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section is called "What is Android? -- The Big Picture." I have to admit, I thought this might be fluff, but it is definitely not. The overview is good, but what the real value is the explanation on getting your development environment setup. This is something that many books fail to mention at all, as it can be a tricky topic to illustrate in a book. It is well done here, and can definitely be a big time save for new developers. More of this kind of "how to" material is also presented in the appendices.

The second part is called "Exercising the Android SDK" and is the real meat of the book. It takes a very practical, top-down approach to Android application development. It starts off by explaining UI concepts, then intents and services. It then dives into excellent detail on some of the key aspects of mobile application development: working with data, using the Internet, telephony, notifications, graphics, multimedia, and GPS. I would recommend that you immediately read the chapters 3-6 (UI, intents, services, data management, Internet) as these are really the building blocks of any mobile app that is not a game. The other chapters are great too, but you can probably read them as needed. Maybe you don't need GPS today, but need it three months from now. Just read chapter 11 at that time, and you will have no problem. The chapters are self-contained enough for this, while there is still a nice flow of thought between them as well.

The last part of the book is called "Android Applications." It starts off with a very nice example of creating a very "full" application. It really drives in all of the previous material, and is a veritable cookbook of sample code. There are a lot of clever little things you might want to do in your application that you can find an easy to follow sample of in this chapter. I found myself thinking "oh I'm going to rip this off and re-do some part of an existing app." The last chapter is title "Hacking Android" and is all about writing an application in C to run "closer to the metal" on Android. This is probably not that useful to most developers, but I imagine it would be invaluable if you actually did need to do something like this. If nothing else, it is a good read and reveals fascinating aspects of Android's internals. It certainly demonstrates the technical mastery of the authors.

Review omitted for brevity... Thats how I feel about the code examples. Whatever happened to the good ol' days when code examples were long but complete. If someone is a beginner, they don't know how to complete the code that the authors decided to leave out.

If you use this book as a supplement to the developer.android.com documentation, you will be better off than depending on this book as a source.

The book is good but there are several typos and sometimes it is hard to follow. The authors forgot to put more diagrams and pictures to explain the concept better. Developers are very visual people and we tend to understand concepts through diagrams or drawings on the board. There some cases where the book gets very tedious and difficult to follow. The code examples are very good but again I would have love to see 3 or 4 lines of code and then an explanation.

The general overview stuff is good, but it is not possible to learn how to program Android with this book.

They only show code snippets and absolutely gloss over very key things. I guess they expect you to just look up stuff in the documentation, 95% of the time. There is literally no explanation. Just stuff like now you have created the contacts list. Well, anyone can read what the method does. You need to say how it works. I had to look at the documentation to figure some of it out, but then why do I need this book? Very precious few lines of the code are explained in any sort of detail.

The examples are also extremely complicated. Very. It's like jumping directly into the deep end. Not only is the code pages and pages long, but they don't show all of the code, unless you download it yourself from their website.

It's also highly technical even for a technical book and I think would be best for someone who ALREADY knows Android.


Learn Android first, then buy this book.

with this book.

From sliced and diced source listings with little or no context to horrible examples of how absolutely not to code properly (seriously??? *final* members to attach click listeners to View's within your Activity instead of implementing the OnClickListener interface and dispatching from there???).

This book is a COMPLETE waste of your cash. If you want fantastic coverage of the breadth and depth of the Android platform, do yourself a favor and purchase the Commonsware license for the "Busy Coder's Guide" series of books. the best $40 i've spent for four complete Android books.

Steer clear of this book.

In "Unlocking Android" the information you need is buried in page after page of commentary and odd code listings. If you want a shockingly concise Android book for developers, get "Hello, Android." Hello Android gets straight to the point, a necessity for real developers. One half-evening of reading Hello Android left me feeling confident and excited about Android development.

Not being an Eclipse developer (Netbeans fanboy), I was determined to use Eclipse as the IDE for my Android development even though I had already set up my development environment on Netbeans--which works good too. I wanted to get comfortable with Eclipse since it is such a popular IDE for developers, and Hello Android made that easy as well.

This book may prove a valuable reference for some people, and at $10.00 (including shipping), it could well be worth it--especially if you get the free PDF version. The free PDF is available on the Manning website after punching in some codes from the table on the sheet at the front of the book.

The last chapter covers "Hacking Android" which I found very interesting, although it was like the rest of the book--belaboring you with one or two pages of introductory fat. It is almost like they struggled to create a certain number of pages to comply with a book format. Writers know that unnecessary words can ruin any composition. I'm donating my print version to the local library.

I do not like the book.
The code examples are incomplete.
The subject is not explained in any logical order.

Of the many Android developer books, this one seems to work best for me.
Not exactly a "how to", not exactly a "reference", but a mixture that gives the intermediate programmer a boast without overlooking the basics for the beginner.

I would definitely recommend this book to my programmer friends.

This book allowed me to quickly write my first Android App, but then I used it as my sole guide to getting a more solid understanding of the Android SDK and writing more advanced applications.

This book was probably an excellent reference but like all technology it's shelf life is limited by the advances in the language it covers. I found it useful but by the time I read the book a number of areas had changed with the technology.