Books about Android Part 2

The series about my Android books is not yet finished, here comes the second part.

So let’s get started with ‘Professional AndroidApplication Development’ by Reto Meier over Wrox first published Nov 2008

 

This book is really handy, like mentioned by 'Android Application Development' by Rick Rogers it starts at the beginning and guides to through the fundamentals of Android. Mentionable are the chapters are ‘Peer-to-Peer Communication’ and ‘Accessing Android Hardware‘. Anyhow in my opinion this book isn’t that professional as the cover tells, it sure gives you a good start from where you can begin program yourself but really in deep stuff is missing.

I see a fundamental problem in buying books, compared to software, you can get an update if the author enhanced his product but with books you can’t so the author publishes a new book call it ‘My old Book 2’ and start selling it while you are sitting on your old one.  As mentioned in my first post on several Android books, this one isn’t an exception. The new book ‘Professional AndroidApplication Development 2’ by Reto Meier published March 2010, is about the same as its successor, so when buying a book, always buy the newest (and of course with a higher price). The only difference I see is that it seems, Reto Meier makes a metamorphosis from human (first cover) to a robot (second), that’s something I call excessive Android consumption.

So let’s move on, the next book is called ‘TheBusy Coder's Guide to Android Development‘ by Mark L. Murphy over Commonsware published first Aug 2008

 

The author of this book is the same as the author of ‘Beginning Android’ and ‘‘Beginning Android 2’. I have to admit that I like this book as I also like ‘Beginning Android’, it is well written and has a good formatting especially the code-blocks are worth seeing, but also worthy with regards to its content, although it is basic stuff (but in compared to other books it has no ‘Professional’ in its title). What I also like is that the last chapter it is shown how to build a sample application called TourIt.

Now I want to present one of my favorite books ‘UnlockingAndroid’ by W. Frank Ableson, Charlie Collins, and Robi Sen published by Manning, April 2009

First the cover is impressive, rather extraordinary I like that, but I surely don’t judge the book by its cover. This book is a really basic one so if you read another beginners book you probably won’t learn very much, but what makes it inimitable is the type it presents code-blocks, they are made very dynamic, crisp and clear, so you get the meaning and functionality of the code very fast, and it is fun to read.

The last book I want to present is called ‘Hello.Android’  by Ed Burnette published on The Pragmatic Bookshelf, Jul 2010 in its third edition

As I starting reading this book I thought that it won’t differ from the rest I read but it really does. First it starts very elementary, but reading on the book reveals his full potential it is useful for a reference book but also for learning something from start for example SQLite, and also the chapter on ‘Multitouch’ first give me the grasp to understanding it. So this book is very recommendable and also for further reading I advise EdBurnetts blog. 

So that was all for now, I you find hope my aggregation a bit useful.