Programming Android: Java Programming for the New Generation of Mobile Devices 2nd Edition

This book is very likely one of the best resources out there for any developer who's new (or even reasonably experienced) with Android and wants to start making non-trivial apps.I am an absolute fan.Believe me, I wasted so much of my time reading the other highly rated / best selling Android book on Amazon - "Android Wireless Application Development Part-1". That book was ok in its own right but for a developer new to Android, it was organized like crap and was not at all cohesive and didn't give you the bigger picture to make useful apps.This book on the other hand...* Is geared towards the professional from cover to cover* Has excellent structure and organization of information* Indicates paradigms and best practices everywhere and explains by all kinds of analogies to things like web frameworks and apps, etc etc. You will have no issues understanding anything* Most importantly, it has clear, HIGHLY useful, COHESIVE and INCREMENTAL example app code where they build up each sample app gradually with the introduction of new concepts, making the app more useful and feature rich.I can't stress enough the value of this since it helps explain how to effectively USE the concepts / features taught and is kinda similar to how one would develop an app of their own - starting with a simple version and iteratively adding complexity and features to create more and more useful versions.* Is very comprehensive and covers enough of the OS to get you making productive, useful apps rather than naive crap that you can anyways do using the thousands of scattered tutorials on the web.* Even gives you brief and highly useful primers on the concepts / technologies that are pre-requisites for using the book effectively (eg. Java, MVC patterns, SQLite queries, etc etc)You obviously do need to have some programming background and at least basic Java knowledge (like me) to make the best use of the book.That's 6 stars already.I'm reading this now when Android 4.4 just got released, but still find this book very relevant since it covers versions beyond Android 4.0 tooHighly highly recommend !

This book is a great resource for Android, not just for the novice Android-er but also for those who already know their way around the Android OS. I've been writing Android apps for a little over a year and this book helped me firm up knowledge about some of the subjects that had remained hazy to me.It has a fairly good crash course on the way Android uses Java and tries to give a brief overview of Java. But don't expect to learn the ins and outs of Java from the opening chapters of this book.

I really, really wish I could give this five stars. There's so incredibly much useful information in this book that it pains me not to. Even if it were just the theoretical introductions to all the various parts of the Android framework, development environments, and associated ecosystems, best practices, etc., without the code, I would.But there it is. The code. While it's generally good (despite sometimes ignoring its own best practices and showing inconsistencies likely due to multiple revisions), it's incomplete. You're shown -most- of what you need to implement anything more than the most basic of examples; the rest is left up to you to go find on the web.When I initially decided I had a problem with this, I made myself stop and think, and it occurred to me that this is not a reasonable complaint. The book is packed with information; asking the author to pad it out with ridiculous amounts of Java -- which is already plenty verbose -- just doesn't make sense. But then I looked back over what I had been reading for the last several hours. There is so much "we're overriding this just to put in a conditional log statement" with every single available life cycle method in so many fragments and activities that there's honestly no excuse for not dropping that and adding in the actual, useful parts -- the entire fragments and layouts -- that were left out.It's good that the code is made available online and maintained. But copying and pasting into Eclipse is not educational. Reading and retyping while navigating with autocomplete and learning the more important methods and their arguments is a whole lot more beneficial -- for any language or framework -- than it seems until you've tried it. It's invaluable. But this book lets you get about a third of the way through that process before telling you that, no, we're not going through the whole thing. Go download it.I docked another star for dependence on Android API 11+ code. As of this writing -- and I've had this book for a year already -- over a quarter of active Android devices are, according to Google, still running API 10 or less. This means at least some of these examples are just plain useless if you want to learn to code in a way that's reasonably backwards compatible. Fragmentation is not a huge problem, but it's made a problem here by a really strange reliance on API's that are too new to be realistic for most Android developers.While this concentrates on the (very real) problems the book has, it is still a solid text/reference, and I'm certainly not sending it off for recycling. It just fails at such strange points that it's hard not to think it could've very easily been so much better.