Professional Android 2 Application Development

As it is with any other book teaching new technology, I have a certain set of expectations about the presentation and the material. Based on many such books I have read, those that I can call successful share certain traits. Mr. Meier's book is definitely not bad but on my scale it floats somewhere in between "mediocre" and "ok."

First the good part: the book is aimed to those unfamiliar with Android development and it tries to cover a lot of material. So at the very least, this book could be used later as some kind of reference, when trying to get started utilizing some feature of the system.

In general, the presentation of material is decent. A feature is explained, some snippets of code are shown. Then the feature is utilized in the "main" app that is built throughout the book.

On to the bad part (which is always more fun, isn't it?). A successful book on technology X should have a number of practical, diverse, and reasonably complex examples which are build ground-up with increasing degree of sophistication to show practical application of various aspects of the new technology. This book has only one such example (an earthquake monitoring application) and it generally fits the bill covering various subsystems, but it is a very specific type of an app. It would be nice to have several different examples (e.g. a media player, a photo editor, etc.)

A good book this kind must have exercises, ideally of varying degree of difficulty. They drive the point home, forcing the reader to try different things, including those that are outside of the scope of the chapter in question. This book has none.

Now it might be me, but the presentation of some of the core concepts of Android development was not all that clear or practical. Two examples particularly stand out: one is the topic on activity lifecycle. While discussing in detail what it means from the system point of view when the activity is in a certain state is useful, there is very little (if any) information on how these states and transitions are related to the user actions (e.g. what happens to the activity when user starts another app, when a call comes in, when he turns the phone off, etc. etc.) Another such example is the discussion of Adapters - after having read the topic several times, I am still unclear about the relationship between the Adapter and the View it tries to populate.

Last things from the nitpicking department: the book would definitely benefit from more screenshots and less cheesy icons (pretty much every tiny piece of code is adorned with an icon reminding the reader that it can be downloaded from Wrox.com). Finally, I found the way code snippets are typeset (font and formatting) a bit poor as it makes them blend with the text. Using a more optimal font and possibly putting snippets in a box with a border might help this.

To summarize, it's not an inherently bad book and hopefully the next edition will improve on many such points. In the meantime, I recommend carefully shopping around as there may be a better book for picking up Android development.