Reviews for Beginning Android (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

1. Smart Book for Smart Phones

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2009

   Unlike most of the Beginning... series of books from Apress this book assumes a good grounding in the underlying Java language.
   
   Given that limitation, the book does cover the basics of using Android to produce relatively simple but demonstrative applications for the devices that support this operating system. Given the device neutrality of the OS, the software screenshots were shown from within the IDE's simulator.
   
   The book seems to cover the core functionality of the system reasonably well but as the author comments, it's a good idea to keep an eye on the android development websites and user groups. Mr Murphy has more or less promised a second edition - a position bolstered by the fact that android 1.5 was released just weeks before the book's release; enough time to list the major features but not enough to actually talk about them properly (my android phones received 2 updates within a month of getting it so I can testify that this OS is in a ferment of development).
   
   Despite this this book should, with some effort, give you a helping hand into android development, a particularly exciting field as plans to bring it to a netbook format device are being rumoured.