Sunday, January 9, 2011

Book review : The Android Developer's Cookbook : Building Applications with the Android SDK

The Android Developer's Cookbook is a recipe-styled book, where each recipe shows how to use a particular feature of the Android SDK. Each recipe is more or less independent of the others. It's not a classical beginners book, but I think it can still be used to start learning about Android development. It starts with an overview of the Android platform, then presents various recipes in a logical order. First, the most basic recipes : activities, intents, threads, services, alerts, widgets and other ui, events like key presses and Touch events. Then recipes explaining how to use specific functionalities : multimedia, hardware (sensors), networking, data storage, location services like Google Maps, and many more advances recipes. Finally, recipes on debugging.

The authors are using Eclipse and its Android plugin to create sample applications. The book is very easy to follow. There are a lot of code snippets, and some pictures to illustrate their execution. Anybody with some basic UI understanding (e.g. Swing experience) should easily read through the content. It's the kind of book you'd keep on your desk for further reference. It's not a complete reference book though. Explanations and samples are short, so you may still have to look for more detailed information in the online documentation. It's a nice cookbook. Not complete, but well worth reading.

2 comments:

  1. Android has many version.I got a proper idea about Android application by read your post.
    Android app developers

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  2. I really like your header though; very well done. Though the contrast between text and background colour on the page could be improved, part of the difficulty in my reading your text was due to the monitor I was viewing it on. It’s not nearly as bad on a higher quality display.

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