Choosing Study Materials for Android

Choosing Study Materials for Android

Blogs and Internet resources

1.      Android Developers Blog - I am sure there are tons of blogs that you will find on the net about android, but this is the official one, you can’t go wrong here. This one made it to my Google Reader

2.      Android Training - The training website of developer.android.com, it covers a wide range–from fundamentals to pretty advanced topics. These tutorials will make sense more if you are reading a book material

Hopefully, you will add eglobiotraining to your list.

Books

This the short list of the books I used for my android learning. I did not list all of them, only the ones I liked and the ones I thought would actually help a beginning developer get into grips with android.

1.      Learning Android - One of early books I used for android development. Typical O’Reilly approach, thorough and dry—but it has loads of useful information. Good starter book for android.

2.      Beginning Android ApplicationDevelopment (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) - Good to read after the O’Reilly book. Looking back now, I think I should have read the O’Reilly book and this one side by side. There’s 500+ pages on this one. You need to be in front of your machine and ready to code when you are reading this—the examples are prescriptive and recipe type, rather than theoretical and conceptual

3.      The Android Developer’s Cookbook:Building Applications with the Android SDK: Building Applications with theAndroid SDK (Developer’s Library) - When you are done with the O’Reilly and the Wrox books, you will probably dive into a test project. This recipe (aherm, cookbook) will be very handy. The book is organized according to tasks. It assumes you are already pretty handy at coding android building blocks, so don’t pick this up as a first book. Can you do without this? Yes, you can probably spend lots of time lurking into forums, asking questions on stackoverflow and emailing your friends about a specific problem–or you can just get this book, it will take you much less time

4.      Practical Android Projects (Books forProfessionals by Professionals) - So you’ve combed through the three books above, you’ve gone through developer.android.com/training and most probably attended a local workshop in android. Now you are eager to get clicking some more, gear up for a project that you can submit to Google Play for some bragging rights (or some extra cash, or both). Only, you are stumped and out of ideas on what to build, which is not surprising because at the time of this writing (8.Jul.2012) there is more than half-million apps written for android. Can you really think of an android app so unique that the other hundred-thousand developers haven’t thought of yet? If you need some ideas to kickstart your next-killer-app project, you might find some inspiration on this one

5.      Hello, Android: Introducing Google’sMobile Development Platform (Pragmatic Programmers) - It was a pity that I picked this up late. This was the most enjoyable read–or maybe I enjoyed it because I already read the other four? I really can’t be sure now, but if you will take some unsolicited advise, I suggest you read the O’Reilly one first, then this.

If you want to look at a more extensive list, O’Reilly released the Android DevelopmentBibliography for free. You can read it using Kindle (if you don’t have the device, you can run kindle on your desktop.