Beginning Android Application Development [Paperback]

This book has broken the ice on Android development for me. After floundering for a while with spotty tutorials on the web, I realized I'd need a book and picked this one basically because it was one of the newer ones.

I started stepping through the book page by page and following the samples. By around the middle of chapter 3 I was able to break away and start coding my own app and just flipped to the sections of the book I needed for specific advice after that.

The tutorials are good. Straight to the point without the dead weight that plagues so many web samples (where all too often I found a sample that did the 1 thing I wanted and 15 things I didn't, which just created confusion). This book gives you the full code and then goes to a "How It Works" section that goes through the code bit by bit explaining what the different pieces do. That has been an immense help and there's nothing this book covers that left me with any doubt on how to do it.

It's still "Beginning" Android development because it's mostly covering the basics. Lots of options are not covered, but then, that would take another 500 pages. This book will get things functional to the point that if you want to do something more advanced, you'll likely be able to fill in the gaps with the official Android documentation online.

One mark I will put against the book: it did not cover widgets. Still, after using the book to create my widget as an app, I had enough understanding of what was going on that I was able to convert my app to a widget with the help of some online docs (which I previously was not able to make sense of).

Note that the book does not teach you Java. I have never programmed in Java before, though I've used C, C++ and C#, which is similar. Search Google for "Trail: Learning the Java Language" and that will take you to the Oracle site. Between that tutorial and this book, I was able to go from a complete Android novice to putting my first small app on the Market in about a week.

Beginning Android Application Development is one of the best Android books on the market. If you have a programming background, then this is the book you need to get you up to speed. I bought this book because I wanted to acquire as much knowledge as possible about Android, and I must say I was not disappointed.

Wei-Meng Lee as an experienced trainer had put a great deal of effort into how he could best communicate Android to a beginner, and has done it excellently. For example on page 105 to 109 the author writes about screen orientation and persistent state information. This area of Android is so well explained better than any other Android book I have read.

This book has a lot of sample code which can be easily incorporated into ones App, and the explanation does not leave you with more unanswered questions. Like most Android books I still believe having a programming background is still a requirement basically because most Android books teach you how to build Apps, and not how to program.

I have enjoyed reading this book and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in mobile application development. A well deserved 5 stars.

I have a collection of several other android books that jump around and do not explain things thorough so that a new programmer can understand. I purchased this book and it is by far the best one yet! Wei-Meng Lee is gifted in his style of writing. It is easy to follow and understand. I am so excited to finish going through the rest of the book. I highly recommend that if you are only going to get one book, this is it. Thanks for such a wonderful product!