Professional Android 4 Application Development 3rd Edition

I have been making Android apps for about 2 years but I am mostly self taught (with a generous amount of help from StackOverflow). I have a few Android books, but they weren't too helpful and I bought them so long ago that they only covered up to Android 2.1, so I decided I needed to upgrade. I bought this book mostly to learn about Android 4.0 specific features, but it is so much more than that. This book will teach anyone who has at least some experience with Android to be an elite Android developer. I think every single developer should be required to read this book, it teaches you the best practices and how to make your app as good as the best on the market. I've learned so much from reading this book I can't wait to make a whole slew of apps that use it all. This book teaches you why Android is praised for being such a customizable environment by explaining everything you need to know about all of the features of Android. I can't recommend this book enough.

I'm an experienced developer who knows Java. Unlike some other books I have read, this one does a better job of highlighting concepts instead of just code you copy and paste with out comments. I'm about a quarter of the way through the book, but Amazon wanted me to rate it. They must think I'm a fast reader or have nothing else to do!The one area you will run into problems with this book is the Android version to use. While over %50 of Android users have 2.3.x this book is written for 4.0.3. My phone has 4.1.2 at this time and will be updated shortly I hope to 4.2. Quite early he gets into "Fragments" that one needs API 11 or greater (3.x) to use. He might get into how to down grade the code to run on 2.3.x but I haven't gotten to that point. Since I'm using a later version I'm getting just a few deprecated method calls. I decided 4.x while having a small share of the market is going to grow over time.If you want to learn Android development instead of just copying and pasting sample code, this book does a better job than most. I might come back and update this to a five star once I finish some time next year at this pace!

I have been doing Android Development since the bad "old" days of 1.5 (and even before, trying to get it running on several Palm/WIndows Mobile phones during beta).I have been subjected to "The Source is your docs" for so much of that time that I rarely rely on someone else to collate all of the necessary day-to-day information needed to create apps that delve below the "inch-deep" level.Now, I may not change my "Google it" habits (after all, Google-fu is a must-have weapon in a modern programmer's arsenal), however, I can turn to the relevant section of this book and find exactly what I need to get started or dig deeper into nearly any facet of app creation, and even (gasp!) find the relevant best-practices!All in all, Professional Android 4 Application Development is suited to either a programmer just getting started with Android, or the "I have 6 apps in Google Play" developer who thinks they have this Android thing figured out.Excellent work, and I will definitely recommend it to everyone who asks me how to do the Android thing. ;)Peace,Dan

I've been using this book, and the internet in general, to try to teach myself enough of the android sdk to build my first app. I've been programming commercially for 24 years and using mainly java for about 12 years. I have to admit I have not read this book cover-to-cover.I can't understand how a book with "Professional" in the title can omit to address the account manager api to register an account, support sync and notifications, request that the user sign in if the account credentials are out of date, etc, but I can't find anything about it. The index does not contain "sign in" "log in" "authenticate" or "AccountManager" at all. I've read through the detailed contents to no avail. As an android newbie I'm finding this a little painful and I'm just a bit disappointed.There are lots of interesting sounding sections covering database, camera, voice to text, sensors, etc and so I'm hoping it gets better.The code samples could be much better, however. Too often there is a code sample with no mention of which class it should be in or what the imports are - you need to actually download the samples from the wrox web site to make sense of some of them. Kind of defeats the object of the book form.The quality of the jave code in the samples is not great either. I'd like a little more focus on best practices and staying D.R.Y. The examples seem a little simplistic and the coding looks very naive. While I'm competent enough to work out a nice way of structuring the code once I can see how many similar copies of content providers, etc I'm likely to end up with and get my head around the sdk - there is a lot to get your head around and I often feel myself asking "But how would an experienced android developer actually do this - surely not like this example".I've actually found google's samples and on-line tutorial to be more valuable so far. For a book with "Wrox Professional" branding I've come to expect a little more.