Product Description
Full Color! In just 24 sessions of one hour or less, learn how to build powerful applications for the world’s first complete, open, and free mobile platform: Android. Using this book’s straightforward, step-by-s… More >>
Sams Teach Yourself Android Application Development in 24 Hours
I bought this book a few days ago at SIGGRAPH – and it’s great.
Android is a HUGE topic – it’s utterly impossible for a single book to cover even a small portion of Android in depth.
But the authors have done a really admirable job of getting you started from scratch:
* Installing the Android IDE (Eclipse)
* Writing a simple “hello world”, and executing it on the Android emulator
* Step-by-step chapters on building up a simple application that touches on key aspects of the Android
* Etc
The same authors have written another book (published by New Riders, instead of SAMS) with a lot more detail. But frankly, this is the better choice for a “first book”.
You definitely ought to be at least familiar with Java before starting this book, just as it would be good to know a little Objective C before starting out on iPhone (and ESSENTIAL to know MORE than a little C++ before starting out on Nokia/Symbian). But, as the authors point out, Android can be a great way to learn Java.
I highly recommend Lauren Darcey’s and Shane Conder’s book.
Rating: 5 / 5
The first thing that hits you when you flip through the pages of this book is the color. The example screens, diagrams and tables really stand out. It’s a delight to read a full color book and I’m thinking, why have I never come across more full color IT books?
The target audience are developers with a Java programming background who want to start Android development. And the book fulfills this promise very well.
The first couple of chapters are introductory, but aren’t a drag to read (although the concepts of Activities, Intents and the manifest file are better explained in a book like “Hello, Android!” from the Pragmatic Programmers)
A second thing which really stuck out and is well worth mentioning are the “Did you know”, “Watch out!” and “By the way” text boxes which really showed the authors have real programming experience with Android. Those little text boxes sometimes really contained little gems of information. These alone are worth reading every page of this book since you don’t want to miss out on these.
The chapters are called “Hour 1…” and “Hour 2…” and are really targeted to be digested in an hour, max. I sometimes simply read a chapter in half an hour, without working out the examples in the development environment. I know, maybe not the way to go to really learn programming Android very well, but considering the time (we all have so little of) just reading a quick chapter was fulfilling for me anyway
Every chapter concludes with a Q&A section which was a bit tedious. The questions were very simple and the answers were right below the questions, so I skipped those sections further down the book. Apart from the Q&A section each chapter also included some exercises, which really are a challenge, because no ‘answer’ is given there. Just a task. I liked those!
A lot of Android books (or programming books in general) use a sample application which is enhanced throughout the whole book. This book is no different. However, where other books might focus on forms and list this book’s example is a nice trivia game, which makes use of the camera, the network, social features and many other cool Android framework features.
The way the example program is set up and worked out is really the way you (or I in this case) would start fiddling around with Android. At some point it states: “You can copy the QuizSplashActivity five more times…” A very pragmatic approach, and again something programmers do daily. Maybe not the most elegant suggestion, but if you want to achieve something fast (learning Android) that’s just the way I like.
Before you dive into a new chapter, a concept or screen layout a nice diagram is often presented first, which really helps in getting your brain in design / conceptual ‘mode’ (so to speak).
The majority of the Android concepts are covered really well. Shared preferences, context- and normal menus, dialogs, views, view switchers, image media, location based services, progress bars, communicating with a network server, creating home screen app widgets, and many more. Also ‘development’ activities like testing and developing for different devices and ‘deployment’ activities like placing your app in the Android market are present in the book.
The majority of the chapters have sample code, which you can download from a website. The examples all worked in my case. No problems there.
The author’s are active bloggers on mobile application development and Android development in particular. If you don’t buy the book you should definitely check out their blog (at [...]) and the mobile tuts website ([...]), with many of their contributions.
Advanced topics like OpenGL 2D/3D, the SQLite database, content providers and the various sensors, etc. are each described in half to a full page of text, but not more. I would have wanted to see a chapter on SQLite database and one on content providers though, since these are very common in Android apps, even for beginners.
Conclusion: I really liked the full color pages, the text boxes with invaluable information from real programmers and the digestibility of the chapters a real plus. Maybe some advanced features (like SQLite databases and content providers) could have been described in their own chapter, but then again, the target audience is the beginning Android developer. The book is very complete in the sense that it describes the whole process of setting up your dev environment, programming your app, testing it and deploying it on the Android market. I would really recommend this book for beginning Android developers. If you already read one or two Android books and consider yourself a mid-level to seasoned Android programmer don’t buy the book. Maybe skim the pages and read the “Watch out!”, “By the way” and “Did you know” text boxes
Rating: 4 / 5
The book is helpful in many ways, but it does not break it down into step by step instructions and it does not have many workshops where they show you how to do things and give you some code to try out. The book was good in helping set up the development environment, but then basically gives you a bunch of information without showing how to implement it into your application. This book was not made as well as other “Sams Teach Yourself” books I have read.
Rating: 3 / 5
Android programming is a difficult topic to learn. The authors of any introductory book on the subject face a tough task, as evidenced by the low Amazon ratings for most introductory books about Android application development. Unfortunately, this book does not break the mold.
The first five chapters are based around a simple example application called Droid1. The purpose of the app is to show the reader how to display text and pictures while interacting with the Android SDK. This should be easy. But since many of the tasks are described in nonspecific ways, and since there’s no example code provided to show the reader the correct way to, for example, send information to the log, it’s hard.
The instructions throughout the book are vague. For example, on page 118, the book says “Within the TableLayout control add a TableRow control.” It’s not entirely intuitive how to do this in the Android Development Tool, so the user just has to figure it out for himself.
The priorities the authors place on certain aspects of Android are puzzling. For example, the book devotes an entire chapter to implementing an animated splash screen (not an important part of most applications), while it offers just two paragraphs about SQLite databases (a very important part of many applications).
The exercises might be the most disappointing part of the book. In computer programming, there’s no better way to learn than to try to figure something out for yourself. Unfortunately, this book’s exercises just state problems; they offer no hints or solutions. If you get stuck, you can either use Google, or give up and move on to the next chapter.
The book advertises that each of its 24 chapters will take you one hour. Sure, they’ll take you one hour each – if you spend zero time on debugging and zero time solving puzzles like “Within the TableLayout control add a TableRow control.” If you just download and run the authors’ code (which you can do, starting in chapter 6), then maybe you can get through each chapter in an hour. But in order to learn, you really should be building the example application yourself. And that means that some things will almost certainly go wrong, and you will spend time debugging.
Hopefully the authors can take some of the feedback from this page and elsewhere and improve this book for another edition.
Rating: 2 / 5
I was disappointed with this book. The first two chapters are very good. They tell you step by step how to do things and get an application to run. But then starting with chapter three, they keep introducing you to new concepts but do not tell you step by step how to implement them. I learn by doing and this book certainly does not teach you how to learn by doing after chapter two.
Rating: 2 / 5