I’ll Only write a review about something I like.  That’s good news for Mark Murphy and his book:  The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development.  I’ve found this book invaluable in writing my first Android application since I’m not yet familiar with the sometimes perplexing details of the android API.

The book is available in print or through Murphy’s website:  http://commonsware.com/ .   I Strongly recommend the latter for a few reasons.  Firstly Android is a [rapidly] moving target.  The website purchase allows you to download updates for a year and updates do seem to appear from time to time.  Secondly you also get access to the unfinished advanced book.  While that book is unfinished it just so happened to contain a completed chapter explaining exactly what I wanted to do.  Once your subscription runs out you still get to keep the books in pdf form.

Rather than go through an exhaustive list of the contents I’ll tell you what I’ve found useful so far.

The book has LOTS of details on android widgets and how to describe them in your layout xml’s and access them in your code.  It details some of the fancier things you can do such as dynamic list content (albeit different than my earlier posting) and an options menu api.

The book has some chapters on thread handling and application lifecycle.  I had previously spent weeks combing these details out of various message boards and mailing lists as well as pouring over the then-unclear api documentation.  These chapters would have been a big time-saver for me.

Probably the biggest deal for me is addressed in this book and continued in the advanced book:  Background Processes.  There are all sorts of different ways to set up background processes in android and all sorts of different ways to communicate them.  If you’re struggling with untangling the mystery of persistant programs in android this will be $35 well spent.

There are a couple of things that annoyed me a little about the books.  Code blocks are split up into snippet-description-snippet-description sequences so sometimes you have to put the pieces together a little.  He doesn’t always specify where the code would belong in your directory structure (please fix this one thing if you ever read this Mark).  The unorthodox naming of chapters might make it a little tough to quickly find what you’re looking for but they add a lot of character so I’m actually fine with it.  Just be prepared.

All in all the Busy Coder’s Guides are great resources and well worth the money.  I have it open on my other screen *right* now as I write this and will be using it to help put a few finishing touches on my program this afternoon

- Tyson

Tags: Android, book

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 6:44 am and is filed under Android, Development, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.