Breaking Catch 22

Android Application Development
by Rick Rogers, John Lombardo, Zigurd Mednieks, and Blake Meike
Publication date: May 2009
336 pages

Reading previous reviews, my initial impressions were that the book wouldn’t live up to the description. In contrast, I found the book to be a good introduction to the platform and to specific requirements for building an Android application.

The book starts by explaining how to set up your system for development of Android applications with Eclipse. The information was correct and made no assumptions as to your previous exposure to Eclipse. While most of this information is available from the Android Developers site (http://developer.android.com), it did go a step further and explain the layout of the Eclipse IDE. This includes portions directly related to Google’s plugins.

Unfortunately this good section was followed by downloading and installing the MJAndroid project. The project doesn’t work. Like many other reviewers, I was able to download and compile the project, but it wouldn’t run in the emulator, without giving fatal errors. Given that this was the example project for the book, this was a major strike against the it.

The book proceeded to explain various portions of the project and how they relate to the topic at hand. While the explanations of each section of an Application was quite good, doing a good job of helping me to understand the subjects, the code in the downloaded application didn’t match what was printed in the book. It appeared as if the authors were continuing to make changes to the code (for a new edition maybe) and publishing them. Steps should have been taken to freeze the code and make it clear to readers what should be downloaded. This may be the reason the code wasn’t able run on the emulator.

Finally, time is taken to explore how an application is published and what must be done to submit to the App store, the Google APIs, and interacting with databases telephony, and Inter-Process Communication. These were some of the best chapters in the book.

Overall, if a second edition is planned, I would likely read it, especially given the smaller size of the book. The explanations of each section were great. The only overshadowing issue being that the example code didn’t match the actual code, and that it didn’t run on the emulator. My one request for a future edition would be to add a section on interacting with web services and parsing of XML and JSON. And again, thanks to the authors for not basing the entire book around the creation of a game. My vote, 3 stars. It is worth the read if you have a Safari sub.