Learning Android - Official New Excellent Gadgets, Tools & Accesories

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Deon Garrett (Memphis, TN, USA) –

  

Learning Android is a very nice tour through developing Android applications. It’s aimed at programmers who are comfortable with Java already, and doesn’t waste any time getting into what’s different about Android programming. If you’re looking for a guide to save you a lot of time getting from “absolute Android beginner” to “comfortable consulting the API documentation on your own”, I think Learning Android is quite a good choice.

Most of the book is devoted to incrementally developing a simple Twitter app. Whether you like or dislike this style of exposition is something of a personal preference, but I will say the chapters are chosen pretty well, and aside from the obvious fact that later chapters assume the code from the previous ones, I never found myself needed to flip backwards a lot, which can sometimes be a problem with books that try to develop a single application over a few hundred pages.

I think I’m probably representative of the target audience for this book. I have quite a bit of experience programming in various languages, and I’m an experienced iOS developer, but with no real prior exposure to Android programming. For me, the book was nearly ideal. I was able to breeze through it pretty easily while getting a very good basic overview. It’s certainly targets Eclipse and the associated Android tools that go with it, but the book was generally careful to also at least show the actual files that were generated. As an emacs user who was going through the book using only the Android SDK tools, this was a helpful touch. One minor disappointment is that while the book does a nice job of explaining what Eclipse is doing so that you may do it yourself, it doesn’t always provide much coverage of the Android SDK tools or how you would use them to accomplish the same tasks. You can generally find that information elsewhere, but going only by the book, you might sometimes think, “OK, so I need to create this XML file. I guess I can just type it in, but is there an SDK tool that generates the skeleton or do I just do it all by hand?”

In terms of formatting, all the code samples and other text resources such as XML files were presented very nicely. The samples are annotated with footnote overlays that point you to a fuller description of important lines or content that has just been introduced. I noticed very few errors, either in code or in the text, and those I did see were typically minor annoyances rather than issues which change the meaning of a passage.

My overall impression of the book is that if you have a reasonable amount of experience with Java, you can quickly get up to speed with quite a bit of what you need to start targeting Android devices using this book, which for my purposes, made it nearly ideal.

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Learning Android by Marco Gargenta is what I would consider a high level introductory book for those well grounded in Java or have a strong OO development background and don’t mind coming up to speed in order to learn Android. If you like to learn by building out non-trivial applications in a style that mimic’s real world development then consider this book.

I have been writing Java code on and off since Java was considered one of those fringe languages for those a bit off kilter OO types. I also have a style of learning that is not book oriented. I seem to prefer the ad hoc “random walk in the woods” approach. Good for discovering a lot of interesting stuff, not so good at getting a well oriented systematic approach to developing in new areas. When Learning Android by Marco Gargenta was release I decided to have a go at a more direct approach. Since I had been developing in Android for several years this was not my traditional behavior.

The book is well suited to those with a solid Java background. Needless to say if you have a strong OO background and have developed in OO languages you will not have a problem, but I recommend you have a strong Java book at your side and a willingness to spend time in the Java references to get the most out of the book. The book covers a lot of ground and is defiantly not a “now push this button” style book.

The preface mentions that the book evolved from years of the authors teaching Android in Bootcamp style classes. This shines through in the book with little snippets of knowledge that pop up at the right moment, almost anticipating reader questions and not relying on the reader to research the issue. This is obviously the byproduct of teaching many classes and occasionally watching students flail.

The theme of the book is to incrementally evolve a “twitter like” application. Not my favorite domain but very enjoyable and an excellent vehicle for covering a lot of Android functional ground. Each chapter covers a broad Android functional area such as UI, Services, Broadcast Receivers, Content Providers, file and DB systems, etc. With each chapter new functionality is introduced based on these core functions, the application is refactored and in the process the reader incrementally understands the relationship of the components. While the incremental enhancement approach can be a risky approach for a book, as opposed to books that develop limited demo capability on a per chapter basis, it works well and keeps the reader engaged. Going through the book has the feeling of developing a real world application with all the success and failures one would anticipate.

The book does a good job of introducing the Android stack, Libraries, and the general concepts required for Android development. There is good treatment of the development environment setup, Eclipse, DDMS, appropriate API’s, etc. and along the way introducing the reader to debugging techniques and tricks. The author provides a “twitter like” site with the appropriate API for development purposes. This gives the developer a real world site to experiment with and provides great feedback as the project evolves.

I enjoyed how the book incrementally evolved core functions that was not simply adding on to existing code, but required refactoring of large chunks of code. This juggling of the allocation of core functions helped with the learning process of how to really “wire up” a non trivial application. While I learn by banging in code and flailing with the debug process (as opposed to cut-and-paste), the provided sample code, segmented by chapter, was nearly flawless and provided a fantastic backup.

As a side note, in the first week of work with the book there were some minor issues with the “twitter site” used for development. The author was incredibly helpful and responsive in resolving the issues. I liked this, having experienced books where promised code or documentation never materializes. The errata site on O’Reilly was active but the majority of the issues discovered by the first couple readers through the book were minor and would in no way stall a new reader.

I very much enjoyed working through this book. If you have a good grounding in Java you will really appreciate the pace of the books and its focus on Android specific functions. If you are new to Java but are comfortable with other OO languages and want to get up to speed with Android fear not, I think you will be OK with a little slogging. The book served my purpose by filling in little holes in my knowledge that I may have missed over the years and understanding new patterns and approaches.

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This is a fairly good book that will take you through your first steps on Android application development. It goes over key concepts like activities, services, intents and asynchronous tasks, explores the helpers and builders in Eclipse (but does not refrain itself from going into the XML when needed) and does so by going through the development of a simple application. I think the best way to go through this book is to follow along and build your own. If the book has any weak spot, it’s the sample application. For a book like this, I would not use a Twitter client – the Twitter API introduces some needless complexities into what should be a trivial example (and I, most certainly, don’t want to develop yet another Twitter client). By going with a Twitter client, the book also somewhat limits itself to a certain narrow usage example and that affects what the book covers in terms of UI and tooling.

It took me a while to get through it because I opted to write an application different from the Yamba example (for the reasons I stated above). If you decide to go closely with the book example, you should do it in about a week. It also didn’t help me the fact I could not dedicate more than a couple hours per week to the project.

A final piece of advice: I reviewed the ePub version on a Nook. The screen images were somewhat hard to read and I had to use the PDF version to see some of the finer detail. I am not sure whether this is a problem with the ePub version or with my specific e-reader (it has some issues). Your mileage may vary.

Pros: Short, easy to understand, well written

Cons: The example app is not perfect for the task

Best uses: Those new to Android

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