Saturday, August 18, 2012

Android for Programmers: Developer Series book reviews

Android for Programmers: An App-Driven Approach (Deitel Developer Series) 

Author review 

The professional programmer’s Deitel® guide to Android™ smartphone and tablet app development and the Eclipse IDE with the Android Development Tools (ADT) plug-in

Billions of apps have been downloaded from Android Market! This book gives you everything you’ll need to start developing great Android apps quickly and getting them published on Android Market. The book uses an app-driven approach—each new technology is discussed in the context of 16 fully tested Android apps, complete with syntax coloring, code walk-throughs and sample outputs. Apps you’ll develop include:

- SpotOn Game
- Slideshow
- Flag Quiz
- Route Tracker
- Favorite Twitter® Searches
- Address Book
- Tip Calculator
- Doodlz
- Weather Viewer
- Cannon Game
- Voice Recorder
- Pizza Ordering 

Practical, example-rich coverage of:
- Smartphone and Tablet Apps, Android Development Tools (ADT) Plug-In for Eclipse
- Activities, Intents, Content Providers
- GUI Components, Menus, Toasts, Resource Files, Touch and Gesture Processing
- Tablet Apps, ActionBar and AppWidgets
- Tweened Animations, Property Animations
- Camera, Audio, Video, Graphics, OpenGL ES
- Gallery and Media Library Access
- SharedPreferences, Serialization, SQLite
- Handlers and Multithreading, Games
- Google Maps, GPS, Location Services, Sensors
- Internet-Enabled Apps, Web Services, Telephony, Bluetooth®
- Speech Synthesis and Recognition
- Android Market, Pricing, Monetization
Android for Programmers: An App-Driven Approach (Deitel Developer Series) Development Reviews 

Some Customer reviews  

No1: I initially selected this book due to the multiple authors, hoping it would be more error free than other book I have read from single authors. So far that has been true, the more eyes in the review process really help not only catch errors but organize the material. Little things like all code snippets having line numbers and being high-lighted to follow the text really help. There are a good number of screen shots that make it easy to follow along with Eclipse on a windows or mac machine. I read so many posts on the internet saying Android has no GUI builder to layout widgets, and was very surprised, it wasn't until this book, I found out they are wrong. Adroid being what it is with Google behind it needs all the help with documentation and organization it can get. Google has that tendency to just leave it as-is, while their phD's make more hard to follow videos. The 16 apps they use as examples cover a nice range of UI, Services and libraries. The only negative is I'd prefer to not use Eclipse and would rather use my editor and a make file, but this isn't the authors faults, Android seems to be married to the ADT visual layout editor plugin and the ant build system. This book is for the rest of us that are normal C++ or C# or Java folks and can talk layman terms in getting the job done. The authors are to be commended for that alone! 

No2: This book is well written and logically structured. It is not a book about Java programming, so you might want to look at other books if that is what you need. I found the app driven approach easier (and more interesting) than the standard online tutorials. The book also contains numerous links to helpful Android web sites. This is particularly useful for those who want to dig deeper into any topic.

No3:  I'm working my way through Android for Programmers (an App-Driven Approach) and it is by far the best (of the three I've purchased!) on Android development.The book presents the app/code and then goes through it allowing you to cut and paste more mundane tasks(variable declarations and GUI formatting) once you've mastered them and allows you to focus on the JAVA and techniques.
I don't have a ton of Java experience, but I found this extremely easy to pick up (if you know Ruby, C++, C# or other Object Oriented Languages, you can easily follow the Java).
One negative: The online chapters aren't done as of 3/17/2012; hopefully soon.

Overall, the book is very easy to follow with great examples but I recommend you to read this book first Beginning Android 4 Application Development Reviews  then this book .

Level  : intermediate level so you must read the previous book before to begin this book . 

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