Professional Android Application Development (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) |  | Author: Reto Meier
Publisher: Wrox
Category: Book
List Price: $44.99
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Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 97702
Media: Paperback
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0470344717
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9780470344712
ASIN: 0470344717
Publication Date: November 24, 2008
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Product Description
A hands-on guide to building mobile applications, Professional Android Application Development features concise and compelling examples that show you how to quickly construct real-world mobile applications for Android phones. Fully up-to-date for version 1.0 of the Android software development kit, it covers all the essential features, and explores the advanced capabilities of Android (including GPS, accelerometers, and background Services) to help you construct increasingly complex, useful, and innovative mobile applications for Android phones. What this book includes - An introduction to mobile development, Android, and how to get started.
- An in-depth look at Android applications and their life cycle, the application manifest, Intents, and using external resources.
- Details for creating complex and compelling user interfaces by using, extending, and creating your own layouts and Views and using Menus.
- A detailed look at data storage, retrieval, and sharing using preferences, files, databases, and Content Providers.
- Instructions for making the most of mobile portability by creating rich map-based applications as well as using location-based services and the geocoder.
- A look at the power of background Services, using threads, and a detailed look at Notifications.
- Coverage of Android's communication abilities including SMS, the telephony APIs, network management, and a guide to using Internet resources
- Details for using Android hardware, including media recording and playback, using the camera, accelerometers, and compass sensors.
- Advanced development topics including security, IPC, advanced 2D / 3D graphics techniques, and user–hardware interaction.
Who this book is for
This book is for anyone interested in creating applications for the Android mobile phone platform. It includes information that will be valuable whether you're an experienced mobile developer or making your first foray, via Android, into writing mobile applications. It will give the grounding and knowledge you need to write applications using the current SDK, along with the flexibility to quickly adapt to future enhancements.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 28
 Poorly organized March 16, 2010
Jason Voegele (Cincinnati, Ohio United States)
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Although there is some valuable information here (and some surprisingly well-written sections), overall the book is too poorly organized to be effective. There are too many digressions and tangents that distract from the overall flow of the book, and it is also hampered by poor editing.
out dated material, no help from MFR January 24, 2010
Dennis H. Shipman
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
The material is outdated, the software it refers to you can't get. the MFR says there is no written updates to use the book with current software. They didn't care if you could use the book or not, their just glad you bought it.
Dennis
 Beginners beware: Not the best book for those new to Android or Java January 18, 2010
Earl Louis (New York, NY)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I bought this on the strength of the other Amazon reviews, but was disappointed. I have years of programming and application design experience, some in Java, but none with mobile applications or Android. At the beginning of the book is a section on "who this book is for" and it says you don't have to know Java, mobile development or Android to get through the book. This is false. While there is a lot of information in here, it is presented piecemeal and in a disorganized fashion, leaving one to hunt all over Google's Android website to complete the partial explanations one finds in the book. In addition, take note that it was written for Android 1.0;the most current Android version is 2.0 and is somewhat different. Having used other Wrox books and having found most of them very logically organized, with clear explanations of the code, I was surprised by this one. I'd suggest the author include more complete descriptions of the code and the terms used, how to set oneself up in the IDE, and some appendices containing information about the most used classes. The book has useful information, but it is not for those new to Android.
Not newcomer friendly AT ALL January 15, 2010
Terrance Shaw (Virginia Beach, VA USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I bought this book as my first foray into Android development, based on the reviews here so far. Now, though, I know that I probably should've actually read the reviews, as they may be a bit more thorough than their simple star-based ratings convey.
The book touts itself as, being for "anyone interested in creating applications for the Android mobile phone platform. It includes information that will be valuable whether you're an experienced mobile developer or making your first foray, via Android, into writing mobile applications."
From the "making your first foray, via Android, into writing mobile applications" part, I'd assume it meant newbies. This couldn't be farther from the truth. The book is inconsistent with the way topics are handled, and it feels almost entirely non-linear within any given chapter.
There are many different issues with the book, among those:
* This book targets Android somewhere back around the 1.0 release. As we're now on the 2.0 release of Android (and moving on to 2.1), this book is quite a bit obsolete. Most of the coding is still functional of course, but if you're new to development in general, you're most likely not gonna be able to figure out how to retool the code.
* Though he walks you through sample applications to familiarize you with the concepts he teaches, he seems to lose interest fast and goes on seemingly random tangents throughout the book. Case in point: Chapter three had you making a revision to the layout of a ToDo List app you were designing. After making a minor change to the code, he starts you off on a Compass app.
All that being said, if you're completely new to Android development, I would suggest you avoid this book as your first option. Instead, you should go with something a bit more simple like "Hello, Android". And while you're at it, you'll probably want to pick up a book on Java development, since both Android books assume some level of knowledge in Java development. The one I purchased to go along with "Hello, Android" is "Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours". I've finished the first of the two, and it's quite a bit easier to follow than PAAD. What's more, it's linear, and he doesn't stray from the current lessons to go on some sort of tangent about how robust Android is like Mr. Meier does.
I didn't even finish this book.
I can't.
And I probably never will.
Not with so many other fine choices available.
Better than the online documentation December 11, 2009
Joshua Davies (Dallas, TX United States)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I muddled my way through the docs on developer.[..], floundered around for a while, and then picked up this book. I must admit, I'm glad I did. Although I'd say the first four chapters present essentially the same material you can get from the free online docs, they do so in a much more coherent way. The ordering of the material made a lot more sense than the online docs, too - for example, services aren't mentioned in this book until chapter 8 (whereas they're mentioned on "page" one of the online docs). This presentation resonated with me, and made everything "click".
The organization of this book is, IMHO, the only useful way to organize a technical book, which is to explain the concepts behind some key point, followed by a working code example, which can be followed incrementally by the reader. Each example is presented in the simplest way possible, and subsequently refactored to use more complex (but more manageable) "convenience" features. This *is* a Wrox book - so there's almost as much code as there is discussion text. You won't get anything out of this book unless you plan to study the examples very carefully (and in many cases, dig down to figure out why certain code works a certain way - especially in the "advanced" chapter 11).
One concern I had, going in, was that the book was written for Android 1.0, but the current (as I write this) version of the Android SDK is 2.0. Fortunately, the differences were slight, and didn't make it hard to follow along at all. There were only really three noticable differences between the 1.0 SDK that the book was developed against and the 2.0 SDK I was following along with. Chapter 7 on the maps API was outdated (The book says you can use any string as your "maps API key". That was true when the book was written, but is no longer the case - you now have to register with Google to run the maps demos.) Chapter 9 included a long section on "GTalk" which has actually been removed completely from the API (this is, in fairness, referenced as a possibility in the book), and the Bluetooth API has changed considerably since 1.0. Otherwise, the code samples all worked "out of the box". Of course, there's no coverage of the NDK (Native Developer Kit), which was introduced with Android 1.5.
This book does a great job of presenting the overall end-to-end Android application development experience. One area where I thought coverage was lacking, though, was UI and layout management. This is probably the most important aspect of Android application development, yet there's very little content in this book about it. Also, this book is about Android, specifically, not about mobile application development. Terminology such as "Edge", "3G", "GPRS" and "LAC" are thrown around but not defined, and there's not much discussion regarding designing (or redesigning) for a mobile device - the author assumes you already know _what_ you want to do, and you're just trying to figure out how to do it in Android.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 28
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