Reviews for Professional Android Application Development (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

1. Overall a good book

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, September 12th, 2009

   I bought this book when it first came out and never touched it till a few weeks ago. Now android is on 1.5 and this book is based on 1... but all the code still works and you can follow the examples fine... you are not missing out on much with the 1.5 release.
   
   There are 3 main examples which you build upon in this book:
   
   The first is a notepad application which starts you out on what views are and how to create menu items. You then add providers to it and write and read everything from databases.
   
   The second is a WhereAmI application which you build from scratch which gives you your current location based on available resources sucha as whether GPS is enabled. This links google maps to your application where you plot your current location on.
   
   The final example is a Volcano application which introduces a more complex settings menu along with plotting volcanoes locations using google maps. It introduces background processing, notifications and connecting to a website to grab rss data to display.
   
   The reason i gave the book 3 stars and not higher is because it is sometimes unclear as to where it wants you to put code and occasionally has code which will not work... and you have to go looking on the internet to find the solution. This only happened a few times to me while reading the book, but was annoying when it did as the books website did not have the solution in its errata... but i found the solutions on the books website forum.
   
   I think it covers an awful lot and explains it well... it could be better however and clearer. If you ever need more information the author refers you to the android help pages, as otherwise the book would be twice as thick,giving you the option to go away and read more if required. Such as with the maps API key, you need to go and find out how to generate your key... which wasnt too hard.
   
   I think this is one of the best android books out there, as have looked through a few others and they were awful. This and Hello Android book in my opinion are the 2 to by if you want to get into writing android applications... and go check out the official developer website as that is very detailed and good.

2. A good introduction

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2009

   A good introduction to development of Android apps. It's not in-depth, so I've had to go elsewhere when I've wanted to do something more advanced with any particular feature it describes, but it does cover quite a wide selection of the different topics/APIs. I've been using this more than the other book I bought - Android A programmer's guide (DiMarzio).
   

3. Best so far

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2009

   Had to write a review about this as the only other comment written about this book is very misleading.
   This is the best Android book released so far.
   Thats not to say its a great book but all the others are rubbish in comparison.
   Yes it is a bit out of date but when your writing books about a rapidly moving target it gets out of date very quickly. At least it is based on 1.0, most of the others don't even cover 1.0

4. Terribly outdated - and not very detailed

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2009

   The API's that this book is based on are terribly outdated - but even when disregarding the confusion this causes, it is still not a very good book. Lots of gigantic source code blobs to make the page number rise, and skipping on the detailed explainations. Not recommendable.