Ok, my background. I had been a software developer for over 20 years. I slowly moved to making training films and have been making them for about 9 year (yea, I am that old...) Creating training is great, but I noticed a huge hole in the availability for good interactive training on mobile platforms. (Yea, you have Captivate that creates HTML5 mobile training, but it is weak at best) Because of this I decided to take it upon myself to learn Android development and enhance my skillset with mobile training. With my strong background in C++ development I thought it would be an easy transition. Well it isn't...
So I purchased tons of books, watched videos on youtube, read through developer.android, and while I understood technically what was going on, it just was not clicking for me. Then I found Android from A to D.
First the cons:
-There are quite a few typos in the book. A lot more than I would have expected, but none of them so bad that it makes the book unreadable.
- Much of the code is borderline unreadable on my tablet. The main reason is the wrapping of the text.
Now the pros:
The author's style is is like a fun professor. His choice of words and variable names often made me laugh. But it made reading a lot more fun. Rather than a long boring text book, he actually made it a fun read. The book opens with Scott walking you through the default "hello world" app, generated automatically when you create an app with the eclipse environment. He explains in terms you can understand exactly what is happening. He does not delve into theory about why something happens you just shows you why and explains the important parts that you need to know.
This is followed by a chapter to get you started on JAVA. Again same format, he explains the things you will "need" to know without going into heavy (and boring and useless) detail about it. His explanation of what inheritance and implements is spot on. Just enough information to get you started and understand the things you need. From there he moves to the eclipse environment. Here he gets falls away from his standard explanations and gets a little more detailed about functionality you probably won't use for a while (if ever).
Then it is on to the parts of an android app. This is where the book excels. His explanations of the different parts of an android app are presented in terms you can relate to if you have programmed in other languages. He explained layout, views, how the different xml files are related to your app all with real world examples that let you understand how things are put together. He continues with the same writing style with activities, event handlers, intents, the manifest, and walks you through each of these (and more, I won't list ever chapter) with enough explanation and real world comparisons that it lets you learn what you need to know to get you started.
He flat out states he is not an expert (though that is not obvious as you read) but walks you through all the problems he had while learning. This lets you learn from his mistakes, making the learning curve much smaller. He saves you endless hours of web pages and youtube video tutorials that would otherwise waste your time. The book is straight to the point, well written (less the typos mentioned above), and contains enough information to get you started.
This is not a book for experts to gain new knowledge. While it is for beginners he covers all the topics you will need to create some pretty sophisticated apps for Android including a few good chapters on content providers and SQLlite.
If you are looking for a great book to learn android development I can not think of a better purchase. And speaking of purchase, the price of the book is insane. He could easily charge 10 or 20 times as much for the book and it would still be worth it. If you are new to android development then this is a must have book!
Great writing style, plenty of great information, real world examples, and easy to read. You can't go wrong with this purchase.
Good job Scott!
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