Reto Meier

This is the 'bible' of Android 2.x development, and retains that honour mainly because there aren't many serious contenders for the crown.

Seriously, this book could have been so much better. Yes, it covers much of the ground you need to cover to get up and running with android development. But it is not very good for (a) diving in like a cookbook: too many examples cross multi-chapter boundaries so the 'quick lookup' becomes 20 minutes of cross-referencing (b) understanding why to do things one way over another. Typically, examples are just tutorials walking through "one way to do it", with no discussion or critique of alternatives, and (c) it also stops short of covering (critical?) topics like consuming web data (json / xml) and how to design applications accordingly.

In summary, I got my money's worth, it is just a shame this couldn;t have been the 'perfect' reference for android development.… (más)

This is the 'bible' of Android 2.x development, and retains that honour mainly because there aren't many serious contenders for the crown.

Seriously, this book could have been so much better. Yes, it covers much of the ground you need to cover to get up and running with android development. But it is not very good for (a) diving in like a cookbook: too many examples cross multi-chapter boundaries so the 'quick lookup' becomes 20 minutes of cross-referencing (b) understanding why to do things one way over another. Typically, examples are just tutorials walking through "one way to do it", with no discussion or critique of alternatives, and (c) it also stops short of covering (critical?) topics like consuming web data (json / xml) and how to design applications accordingly.

In summary, I got my money's worth, it is just a shame this couldn;t have been the 'perfect' reference for android development.… (más)