I've read and attempted to work through a lot of programming books. This is one of the best so far. I'm currently at chapter 5, so it's early in the book. But I have a strong foundation and can't wait to get to the rest of the book. By the time I've gotten even this far in most technical books, I've seen a bunch of typos or things that just didn't quite work. Those types of issues distract me and turn me off,so I'm very happy that I'm free of such distractions and allowed to concentrate on the meat of the book.
One minor ding so far has to do with continuity. In the first couple of chapters, the book leads the reader through creating a quiz app with a Next button to get through the questions. Then a Back button is added (left arrow, really). But then in Chapter 4 or 5 the examples seem to have been written to assume you only have a next button. This could be a bit confusing. For example, while adding a button to allow the quiz user to "Cheat", the book says to add the XML for the button directly before the Next button. But that would put it between Back and Next which is not the intent. Other sections in this area of the book make it appear that the chapter was written before the Back button was added, even though the chapter appears after that time. My suggestion to the authors to make it an even better book is to have someone actually work through the entire book to find "bugs" like this. Maybe the back button was added in the second edition and they didn't have someone run through the whole book after that?
Having said that, the issue above didn't detract from my learning. Instead, I saw the issue and, because of what I had learned earlier in the book, I was able to confidently work around it, further exercising my knowledge rather than just following examples by rote.
In spite of the amount of text I devoted to the issue mentioned above, this book is eminently readable for a tech book. Here are some of the pros I'm seeing:
1. The book does not assume I know things I don't know.
2. Great explanation of key concepts such as the lifecycle of each "Activity" (class that controls the UI in the "Layout"), with explanation of how to save data when your activity is destroyed to reclaim memory or for other purposes.
3. While showing basic examples, the book a ton of very useful "side topics" which are really critical to real development projects in my experience. For example:
How to use the debugging tools.
Basics on using the Android logging framework.
How to use string resources instead of hard-coding strings, so you can sell your apps to the world rather than just to people who speak your language.
Handling special considerations when the device changes from vertical to horizontal.
As mentioned before, I look forward to going through the rest of this book. I feel like it has already paid for itself as of Chapter 5 and going forward I'm just going to receive free valuable well-presented knowledge.
Thanks, Authors!
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Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (Big Nerd Ranch Guides)
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ariz ahmad
Great content and style of writing. Kindle edition pretty good and without any formatting problems.
Reviewed in India on December 7, 2016
