Android continues to be one of the leading mobile OS and development platforms driving today's mobile innovations and the apps ecosystem. Androidappears complex, but offers a variety of organized development kits to those coming into Android with differing programming language skill sets. Android Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach guides you step-by-step through a wide range of useful topics using complete and real-world working code examples.
In this book, you'll start off with a recap of Android architecture and app fundamentals, and then get down to business and build an app with Google s Android SDK at the command line and Eclipse. Next, you'll learn how to accomplish practical tasks pertaining to the user interface, communications with the cloud, device hardware, data persistence, communications between applications, and interacting with Android itself. Finally, you'll learn how to leverage various libraries and Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A)to help you perform tasks more quickly, how to use the Android NDK to boost app performance, and how to design apps for performance, responsiveness, seamlessness, and more.
Instead of abstract descriptions of complex concepts, in Android Recipes, you'll find live code examples. When you start a new project, you can consider copying and pasting the code and configuration files from this book, then modifying them for your own customization needs. This can save you a great deal of work over creating a project from scratch!"
so you get these line of codes spreading over many pages but you don't exactly know what you're supposed to be looking at.
I guess a best approach would have been to show what we are going to build first... so that the code makes a bit more sense.
- you have huge portions of code (several pages) followed by a lengthy explanation.
rather hard to read as you must jump back and forth between the code and the explanation
- the code is in black and white and very poorly rendered in the kindle on iPad (when are they going to realize that a PDF is way much better for this kind of books?)
- 1st chapter seems very out of place with a lengthy explanation that somehow fails to really explain what it is supposed to do (Broadcast,Services,Content providers are very poorly explained and out of context).
- the source code is available but you only get the class or xml file, not an Eclipse project you can build/run (if there were screen-shots I wouldn't mind... but there aren't any... Eclipse projects would have helped clearing things up!)...
A must-have book if you are doing Android programming. It is cookbook style, but also goes in-depth in certain places and somehow covers most of the bases. Each recipe has the associated API level as well, which is important. Note that some common issues are identified and addressed which are not obvious from the official documentation.
If you buy this from Apress directly, you can get downloads for both Kindle and iBooks as well as PDF.
A good Android book with lots of WORKING examples. The only down side is that it doesn't have many screenshots, so that you often have to copy/paste everything into Eclipse to see the results.