The Android Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the Android SDK

One Minute Bottom Line

Offers solutions to common tasks needed for Android developers. Easily integrate code recipes into your own projects. Keep on nearest bookshelf for those times of need.

Review

Coming from a background with the now abandoned SavaJe OS (JavaOne 2006 Jasper S20 show device), developing for the Android platform seemed like a natural progression for me. Offering great working examples that can easily be extended for one’s own project, The Android Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the Android SDK book provides a great start. Actually, the book is more than just a getting started guide. The recipe examples provide existing Android programmers with working code for common tasks for the Android 2.2 world. Cut and paste with minor customizations and the examples get integrated easily, as is typical of most cookbook-style programming books.

The Android Developer's Cookbook title consists of twelve chapters with no formal sectional breakup. Assuming basic familiarity with the Java platform and the Eclipse IDE, the authors take you on a journey through the world of Android development. Starting with an introductory chapter on Android, the authors then take you through the core API with chapters on application basics, threading and services, followed by two chapters for UI handling. Then, the book shifts into a more advanced mode with chapters on multimedia, hardware interfacing, networking, data storage, and location-based services. The final two chapters kind of fit into a fourth grouping, with advanced Android development and debugging. The first chapter provides a very reasonable introduction to exactly what Android is, where to find it, how to setup a development environment, and where to market any apps you create. My only real complaint with the introductory material was the hardware list. Before the book hit the shelf, the list of hardware running the platform was dated. Apart from that, by the time you finish the chapter, you’ll be well on your way to creating applications you can sell in the Android Market.

The core API chapters, 2-5, get you to the point of having an application with a screen and responsive buttons/menus, but not much else happening. That isn’t a bad thing. Development for the Android is different than that of desktop applications, so don’t just breeze through these chapters, thinking the meat is in the next section. You’ll still need to understand the threading environment, gesturing input handler, and available UI component set. And that is what this book does. Need a Text Input field in your application? There's a recipe for that. Need to show an Alert? There is a recipe for that. Need to draw 3D images? There's a recipe for that. Just type in the code. Unless I totally missed a reference to finding the source online somewhere, typing the code is what you’ll be doing. For a cookbook that offers code that is meant to be reused, having to type in all the code seems a little antiquated these days. I’m hoping I just missed a reference to download somewhere, though I truly looked all over the book.

The advanced chapters are apt to be the ones most frequently referenced in the book. While new Android developers might find the core API chapters the most helpful, there comes a point where the basics are almost second nature, and you just need to lookup how to do specific tasks: play a sound, connect to a Bluetooth device, dial a phone number, send an SMS, access a database, or layer your store locations on a map, for instance. The Android Developer's Cookbook title offers recipes to solve those problems and many more common tasks. I liked the completeness of the recipes, enabling one to very easily pull an appropriate code snippet into one’s core project source tree. None of the examples stood out as overly complex, though some required integrating with third-party libraries that go beyond the main SDK (like Integrating with Twitter needing the Twitter4J library).

The final two chapters are less about the APIs available and more about techniques for making your applications better. Sure, there are some new APIs introduced here with full recipe examples. It just isn’t all fluffy text descriptions of the features. For instance, you will have a fully functional working example of services like the backup manager. And also fourteen pages of debugging your mobile app from within the Eclipse development environment. Many of these tasks will get more comfortable as you develop more with the platform. I almost felt I should have put the book down for a while and did more programming with the knowledge from the earlier chapters before digging into these last two.

Overall, the The Android Developer's Cookbook provides a great resource to leave on the shelf and pull down for a quick solution to your Android programming dilemma. It’s hard to recommend as a first or only Android development book, but if you have a good grasp on Java development, have done a “Hello, World” application and maybe even marketed your first app, you’ll find a helpful reference here that you’ll return to frequently.