@Satya & Dave: Book Title Decision and what to buy?

[Bill Mote]

Welcome!

I assumed "Pro Android 3" was the 3rd in a series of "Pro" Android programming books as an extension of "Beginning Android" programming books. I never looked at the contents of Pro Android 2. I just assumed it was a natural progression. Now, seeing the contents of your book and the focus on Honeycomb I have to ask myself which book should I buy?!

Of course you would like me to buy yours. I would like to win the book promotion ;)

I'm starting to delve into some of the deeper topics like memory utilization, bandwidth consumption, battery conservation, etc. What's a good patterns book for these things? I was hoping that Pro Android 3 was going to be that book. Maybe it is.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Bill Mote

[Satya Komatineni]

Bill,

Mark has been a constant presence on the Android developers group. He is very very good.

I haven't read his book mainly due to lack of time. However I justify not reading by convincing myself that I dont want to be influenced by other books however marvelous they may be. But again i do read Mark's copious output on the developers group.

I strongly suggest to read what he writes as he is one of the experts on the subject.

However each Author brings a different perspective to a book.

I have to disappoint you that although Pro Android 3 is 1100 pages of significant research we don't cover memory, bandwidth, or battery utilization.

The strength of the book is four fold

1. we cover the fundamentals really deep (processes, threads, long running services, intents, content providers etc)
2. For those that are curious about OpenGL this is one fo the best introductory books on OpenGL
3. Third, we cover lot of the additional APIs: contacts, search, widgets, live folders, touch, sensors
4. Fourth and final, we cover Honeycomb material: fragments, dialogs, actionbar, drag and drop

On top of that most chapters are standalone and you can pick them up in any order (except for a couple in the begining) and examples are self contained and available as eclipse downloadable projects.

Good luck with winning the book.

[Bill Mote]

That's fantastic. It will definitely be on my Father's Day list ;)

Bill

[Ivan Bisevac]

Welcome Satya and Dave.
There is a lot of pages to read (more than 1100) and it's very much. Since this book is for professionals, and I am begginer in Android (not begginer in Java) I don't know if it will be usefull for me, but either way I would like to win this book.

[Satya Komatineni]

Ivan,

I and Dave are experienced Java developers (too old to be open) until we decided to learn Android over 3 years ago. So this book is written as we learened and explored each topic.

So this book is written by experienced Java programmers for Java programmers that knows eclipse IDE well.

Please read the few comments that i have posted on other threads here today.

Each chapter is fairly stand alone. The books is so long because we wanted to explore all options as a good java programmer would asking difficult questions and documenting the results.

we are confident to tell you that you can use and gain from the book.

Bring your java and eclipse IDE and you don't even need a device just the emulator is enough. And this book will teach you what we have learned over 2 years by 3 java programmers

Satya

[Dave MacLean]

I'd also like to add that we take the approach of explaining how it works and how to use the features. Not just do this, do that. You'll find other books cover the same topics, but we'll write 70 pages, they write 10-20. Their information may be correct, but you may be left scratching your head wondering why.

I can't advise well on other books. Like Satya, I didn't want to rewrite what someone else wrote in a book so I've avoiding reading the other titles. In fact, a lot of my learning started with the first Pro Android (I joined our project with Pro Android 2). And I can tell you that researching for the books was often frustrating because a lot of answers just aren't out there. So we experimented, posted questions and dove into the source code. And we wrote about our findings. It was especially gratifying to figure something out that no one else seemed to know the answer to, and to write about it in our book. That's one of the big reasons I think you'll like our latest efforts. It's an accumulation of knowledge over years, and we take the time to explain the stuff you may not find anywhere else.

- dave