Sams Teach Yourself Android Application Development in 24 Hours (Sams Teach Yourself in 24 Hours) 1st Edition
| Lauren Darcey (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Shane Conder (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Lauren Darcey is responsible for the technical leadership and direction of a small software company specializing in mobile technologies, including Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre, BREW, and J2ME. With more than two decades of experience in professional software production, Lauren is a recognized authority in enterprise architecture and the development of commercial-grade mobile applications. Lauren received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
She spends her copious free time traveling the world with her geeky mobile-minded husband and is an avid nature photographer. Her work has been published in books and newspapers around the world. In South Africa, she dove with 4-meter-long great white sharks and got stuck between a herd of rampaging hippopotami and an irritated bull elephant. Shes been attacked by monkeys in Japan, gotten stuck in a ravine with two hungry lions in Kenya, gotten thirsty in Egypt, narrowly avoided a coup détat in Thailand, geocached her way through the Swiss Alps, drank her way through the beer halls of Germany, slept in the crumbling castles of Europe, and gotten her tongue stuck to an iceberg in Iceland (while being watched by a herd of suspicious wild reindeer).
Shane Conder has extensive development experience and has focused his attention on mobile and embedded development for the past decade. He has designed and developed many commercial applications for BREW, J2ME, Palm, Windows Mobile, and Android--some of which have been installed on millions of phones worldwide. Shane has written extensively about the mobile industry and evaluated mobile development platforms on his tech blogs and is well known within the blogosphere. Shane received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California.
A self-admitted gadget freak, Shane always has the latest phone or laptop. He can often be found fiddling with the latest technologies, such as Amazon Web Services, Android, iPhone, Google App Engine, and other exciting, state-of-the-art technologies that activate the creative part of his brain. He also enjoys traveling the world with his geeky wife, even if she did make him dive with 4-meter-long great white sharks and almost get eaten by a lion in Kenya. He admits that it was his fault they got attacked by monkeys in Japan, that he snickered and whipped out his Android phone to take a picture when Laurie got her tongue stuck to that iceberg in Iceland, and that he still hasnt learned his lesson about writing his own bio.
Other Publications by the Authors
The authors have also published Android Wireless Application Development, part of the Addison-Wesley Developers Library series, as well as numerous online technical articles for http://developer.com, http://informIT.com, and their own Android blog, http://androidbook.blogspot.com.
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Product details
- Publisher : Sams; 1st edition (June 10, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 458 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0321673352
- ISBN-13 : 978-0321673350
- Item Weight : 1.98 pounds
- Dimensions : 7 x 1 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,281,508 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,643 in Enterprise Data Computing
- #2,122 in Handheld & Mobile Devices
- #2,422 in Mobile App Development & Programming
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Shane Conder has extensive development experience and has focused his attention on mobile and embedded development for the past decade. He has designed and developed many commercial applications for Android, iPhone, BREW, Blackberry, J2ME, Palm, and Windows Mobile-some of which have been installed on millions of phones worldwide. Shane has written extensively about the mobile industry and evaluated mobile development platforms on his tech blogs and is well known within the blogosphere. Shane received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California.
A self-admitted gadget freak, Shane always has the latest phone, laptop, or other mobile device. He can often be found fiddling with the latest technologies, such as cloud services and mobile platforms, and other exciting, state-of-the-art technologies that activate the creative part of his brain. He also enjoys traveling the world with his geeky wife, even if she did make him dive with 4-meter-long great white sharks, and almost get eaten by a lion in Kenya. He admits that he has to take at least two phones and a tablet with him when backpacking, even though there is no coverage, that he snickered and whipped out his Android phone to take a picture when his wife got her tongue stuck to that iceberg in Iceland, and that he is catching on that he should be writing his own bio.
Customer reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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Why not five stars? Well, I found one thing particularly irritating: At the end of each chapter, there are questions that you can try to answer, and then there are answers. The questions should be designed to teach, but there are too many questions of this sort: "True or false, there are six ways for the camel to walk through the eye of the needle?" False, there are five ways. Questions in a book like this should be designed to teach you - and simply remembering that there are five or six options to do something does not teach anything. The question should teach, the answer should teach, whether you get it right or wrong. Because the questions are poorly designed, they test memorization, not comprehension.
The book is well organized - you see things you can use early, and then you build on those.
About half way through the book, you start using other reference books, or the excellent web resources. But the book is always there.
I believe that they are wrong in that they divide the book into "sessions"/chapters and sessions are supposed to be one hour. Some were significantly longer than an hour, especially those that required you to install something on your computer, some were much less. I ended up ignoring session boundaries, chapter divisions, and the like, and just worked through the book until I got tired of it, then went back to my application.
While I was given a print copy of the book by Amazon Vines, I bought a kindle copy so that I could search the text. I found that the tables on the Kindle Copy were not that useful. That was the final factor in my four star review.
While this method of instruction forces me to delve deeper into the intricacies of Android development in order to make it work, which will, in the long run, probably teach me more about the process, I find it very frustrating along the way.
Am I the only one who feels this way? I don't know. I haven't experienced this method of instruction before. It would be nice, if after experiencing the frustrations of getting the code to work, there was some kind of a disclaimer stating " You probably noticed that this didn't work as you were instructed to enter it into your code. That is because you must ..... ".
A little frustrated, but I will not give up. I will get thru it! Maybe I'll be better off for it.
I knew when I was buying this it would be out of date, and it is. The Android SDK has moved on a lot since this was written, but I was hoping this would give me something to work from. And it might have worked if the book had a better flow to it.
I'm following the game example and even allowing for changes to the environment the instructions are hard to follow. Sometimes You'll be given detailed instructions on what to do, but not told where to do it. Other times you're told to do something without being told how. Often you are given examples of functions you can call with no explanation for the parameters your using. If it wasn't for the examples that came with this book I'd probably not have gotten this far.
Two stars because I can forgive it for being out of date and I have managed to solve the problem I bought this book for.
As for the book (ignoring the Droid Kindle issue)... It says that it assumes that you know x, y, z. Unfortunately, some of those things I don't know which is why I bought the book. Google was essential for figuring out why the examples in the book don't work. It's a bit frustrating to learn more from web searches than from the book itself. This book seems to require way too much figuring out by going to other sources. To be fair, the book might get better as it goes, but I'll never know. I give up on this one. Perhaps on-line tutorials.
To be fair, I do like the Android Kindle application and will continue to use it, just not for technical books. I do like the idea behind the organization of the book. It looks like it does try to address the things I wish to learn. It is just a bitter pill to buy the book twice, I'm thinking about it.
Top reviews from other countries
I can't speak to the quality of the content. I can't read it. Absolutely dreadful.
It's much easier to learn via either videos or a tutor than straight from books as you can ask questions (YouTube comments/messages for example) but I would recommend books as a resource in case you need to check on something.
