Professional Android

Great book, explains the Android principles in quite a bit of detail. I was looking for camera2 API explanation and found few books that had the material on it...

I understand that in some ways this is supposed to be a reference book. However, it just does not do any work to bring concepts together. The entire thing just feels like loosely connected articles or something.I was hoping for a book that puts things together and explains why I should be using PagerView with Fragments versus some other idea. I was looking for some guidance on details and this book really doesn't have that.It does have a list of things and cover some things you may not find elsewhere, but for that it could've just been a list of the technologies / APIs that you should focus on.I'm not sure who this book is for, because you definitely cannot really learn Android programming from this. You can learn about pieces of functionality in Android Programming but you can't really learn how the pieces fit together.It's not for an intermediate developer because advanced items aren't really covered in enough depth to get you from intermediate to professional. And, if you're a professional developer you probably know most of these things anyways and there isn't strong in-depth coverage here.For example, I've been developing Android apps for about 3 years now (within my 25 years of Windows development) and yesterday I was working with the Android Studio template project based upon tabs which implements PagerView and Fragments. I wanted to know more so I came to the book and read the section on Fragments. There were some things in the book about FragmentManager, etc. But that info could never get me through the code that is in the Android Studio project template. The explanations I found online are far better.I understand the challenge of a book is that it cannot contain everything for everyone, but this one just doesn't have enough throughout to really do much for anyone.

You should know some Android basics before diving into this book. It's also recommended that you're comfortable with Java. It's as if Google made a book out of their documentation/guides, but better explained.The author provides general code structure for the concepts explained in the book, and also sample apps that apply the concepts of some of the chapters.If you're new to Android, I recommend books like "Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide". You should get this book thereafter.

I was assigned this book for my mobile development class. Fortunately, I know something about Java, but if you don't know anything about Java, this book is not for you. I also think it takes some liberties and fails to explain some common design patterns in Android, I've encountered several design patterns before in my career, and I think the book may do better to explain what we're looking at and why. For example, MVVM (Model view view model) is a pretty common design pattern in Android, the book doesn't really call attention to that.I also thought it may have made sense to introduce fragments later on in the book. They introduce fragments and tell you why they're so great, but you don't really end up doing much with them until way later... They basically just have you convert the hello world application to use fragments. And then don't talk much more about it until later. So in the case of the earthquake example you're not really adding any value with fragments, so why bother introducing them until you gain something by doing it? Or if they're going to introduce it early, they should have you make an application that uses multiple fragments so you see the advantages.I definitely ended up supplementing my reading of this book with tutorials online and online training videos. So I don't really think this book stands on its own.TL;DR: Overall I think the book was informative. It's just that I think it could have been better organized and there's certain bits of information that they should include that it doesn't that would clue professionals in to key design choices easier.

As always, an amazing book from Reto & now Ian. Android has changed a lot over past 10 years since first book, and the book is 800+ pages. Can be a bit overwhelming, but the book does a great job walking you through the leaning curve..I have been developing on Android for 10 years now, and I learned something new in the first 15 minutes of reading..I highly recommend this..

Without dumbing everything down to much this book makes understanding Android development very clear and concise. Digesting information from this book is like eating cake. The only thing left to do is continue reading and practice practice practice. I have a bookshelf full of Android books and this is simple to read on the level of Head First Android 2nd edition but this book has more information.

Generally good book but note that it was published in 2018 for Android 8.1 and Android Studio 3.1. When I bought it in May 2020 the current download for Android Studio was 3.6.3 and enough has changed where you cannot follow all of the descriptions and screenshots directly. That being said, with the fast pace of change in everything Android I doubt that it would be possible to get any book to the publisher before something has changed. While the book has a lot of good information and background, it is not a substitute for the Android online documentation.

I have gone through the first few chapters. The book is well written, and easy to follow. I would recommend it to anyone trying to get into Android development.

Too verbose and too much theory

I was excited about this book because I thought it would take me beyond the "hello world" Android app phase to building useful interoperable professional grade Android apps.It took me beyond "hello world" but not much. It was pitched to an intermediate/advanced level in that there is a lot of assumed knowledge and steps are not fully explained which is fine - I have designed simple Android apps before and am comfortable with Java so no problem I can follow.So far that's acceptable so how about some advanced concepts that will take my app to the next level!? Nope, none of the really meaty advanced topics ... Like how do you connect to a networked DB? A RESTful API or connecting to cloud resources? Nope nadda nothing on that.To be fair, it was fairly informative on app deployment strategies - which was genuinely helpful to me and earns the book a couple of stars. But nothing on REST or cloud based resources in this day and age? hmmm nah there's better books out there.

Excelentes ejemplos y muy bien explicado, sobre todo el tema de mapas y el location manager. Falta el tema de consumo de servicios web

Es un libro abundante en su tema, explica todo de una manera amena. Lo recomiendo ampliamente. Además Amazon me respetó el precio más bajo, al final me salió más barato que lo que cuesta en la misma empresa editora del libro (Wiley). Lo agradezco mucho.

This book requires close study, by that I mean reading, re-reading, imagining, trying out things to test your understanding - in short restructuring in your own mind to fully grasp things. If that is done then it is a good-to-excellent book. I am a very visual learner, the old adage that "a picture is worth a thousand words" is so true in any context. I just wish that the authors had included a few more diagrams and analogies to ease the point home.