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Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform
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| List Price: | $32.95 |
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Product Description
Android is a new software toolkit for mobile phones, created by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. In a few years, it's expected to be found inside millions of cell phones and other mobile devices, making Android a major platform for application developers. That could be your own program running on all those devices.
Getting started developing with Android is easy. You don't even need access to an Android phone, just a computer where you can install the Android SDK and the phone emulator that comes with it. Within minutes, "Hello, Android" will get you creating your first working application: Android's version of "Hello, World."
From there, you'll build up a more substantial example: an Android Sudoku game. By gradually adding features to the game throughout the course of the book, you'll learn about many aspects of Android programming including user interfaces, multimedia, and the Android life cycle.
If you're a busy developer who'd rather be coding than reading about coding, this book is for you. To help you find what you need to know fast, each chapter ends with "Fast forward" section. These sections provide guidance for where you should go next when you need to read the book out of order.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #591262 in Books
- Published on: 2008-12-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 228 pages
Editorial Reviews
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Customer Reviews
Hello Andorid!
This book definitely started me off in the right direction for making my own applications for Android.
Although this application misses an important section, "Publishing your application", the book is on the design process of the applications.
The book starts you off by familiarizing you with how the Android is run and the general idea of its interface. Then come the example applications which can also be found online.
Each example application is a different use of the Android...
Sudoku, GPS tracking, MySQL, OpenGL, Browsers, etc... This shows you a basic example to a solution.
This book does everything it intends to do for a user of the G1 starting to program. I have never programmed in Java and XML(C and HTML, though), and this book managed to get me understanding and writing basic applications within several hours.
I wouldn't recommend this book if you don't understand basic code because the book does jump into it rather quick and has many technical words. However, for a small book of 200 pages, each summary is very concise and exactly what was necessary to learn the understanding of the material- if you really want more, Im sure Wikipedia and Android-forum along your side will solve all your problems.
The only problem I have with programming now, is customizing my applications to my liking. But this is just learning programming better.
I plan on having many applications on the market place after learning a bit more java, XML, and practicing just a bit!
Thanks and good luck G1 programmers!
Excellent Android Coverage for Newbies
This is exactly the book I wanted and what any developer who wants to learn Google Android Needs.
The author did an excellent job in just 200+ pages to give you core concepts and tips to start coding an Android.
Ofcourse in 200 pages he cannot explain all the details but google itself has good documentation also to learn those details.
My overall experience of Android SDK is that it is very powerful SDK which can do many things that other Phone SDKs were never able to do because of phone limitations. But also a bit disappointed in somewhat poor design of the API itself.
Excellent introduction to programming Android applications
This is the book to get if you know nothing about Android. It teaches through several examples, namely sudoku and a spinning, textured, translucent cube example. It's about half the size of Professional Android Application Development (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) and because of that is more condensed and to-the-point. I would recommend this book over the Wrox one as a first/only Android book.
Chapter 1 dives right in and gets your environment set up and the classic "Hello Android!" application running on an emulator. Only after getting code running does it go into details about the Android framework. I like this approach because until you start getting your hands into some code, you can't really appreciate the high-level stuff much or at all.
The sudoku application is started in chapter 3 and is developed over subsequent chapters adding graphics, sound, a dialog box and persistent state. By the end of the book, you will have put together (if you followed the code examples) a pretty cool sudoku app.
The remaining chapters focus on what I believe are the key components to mobile applications. Chapter 5 goes over playing sound and video. Chapter 7 goes over connecting to the internet. Chapter 8 is about SQLite. Chapter 9 (my favorite) is a step-by-step 3D OpenGL graphics example of a spinning, textured, translucent cube.
Bottom Line: This book has excellent examples with explanations of what the code means that will get you started building Android apps quickly. I highly recommend this to anyone looking to buy a first Android book or interested specifically in graphics for Android.
