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Beginning Android 3 ReviewFirst of all, I would like to say that I am in no way any Android or Java expert. I enjoy creating small apps on my free time and have read a few books about programming, but I have no formal education or experience in the field.
The book "Beginning Android 3" seems well suited for someone like me. It assumes that you have some experience in programming and Java, but it starts off easy, by explaining how to install and use the most common tools in your IDE. Then it continues, showing you how to get a simple "Hello world!" type program up and running. If you are using Eclipse, this book covers how to use Eclipse with the Android tools in details. It also covers other IDE's, but I feel that it leans more towards Eclipse. And that is probably not all that bad, since Eclipse is both free, available for most platforms, and probably the most likely choice for someone just starting with Android development.
If you, like me, also have read "Beginning Android 2", you might find yourself thinking "Hey, this book is exactly the same!". And you are actually right. Many of the chapters are exactly the same, word for word. But this book also covers more recent developments in Android, mainly the 3.0 or "Honeycomb", which is an edition of Android intended for devices with bigger screens than what is commonly used for phones. Honeycomb is more Tablet-oriented. The first few chapter is mainly about setting up text and buttons on the screen, and these are the chapters that haven't changed much since the previous book. Then, in later chapters, you'll have more new stuff, and the book explains how you would go about creating an app for a tablet that has more screen space, and how to create backwards compatibility when creating apps that could end up on a phone running 2.3 as well as a tablet running 3.0. Not all classes that are available to you in 3.0 will work on a device running 2.3, and the author shows examples of how you could check for what version of Android the app is running on, and how to load resources accordingly. He explains some of the changes that has been done to Android in the past, and how we should prepare for changes that might come in the future.
Then the book covers other subjects like how to communicate with the internet, how to load and save things on the phone, both preferences and other information that you need to stay put after the application has been stopped or the phone has been turned off. Then we are shown how to use various services, and how to create services of our own, for instance to get the location from the phones GPS and show that position on a map.
The author also show you how to use the emulator, so that you can check how well your app handles incoming calls, incoming messages or the user flipping the screen to landscape view.
In the last chapters of the book, you a briefly introduced to programming in other languages than Java, mainly HTML5 and PhoneGap. The author also mentions Rhodes, Flash/Flex/AIR, Jruby/ Ruboto, Mono for Android and Googles own "App Inventor", but this is just to give you an idea of what is out there. There is nothing here with any meat on it, it's basically just to tell you that it is possible to use these to create an Android application.
All in all I am pretty content with this book. As I mentioned earlier, if you have already read "Beginning Android 2", then you might feel like you have purchased the same book again. However, this book has more in it than the previous one. It has about 540 pages, where the previous had about 370 pages. If you do not have any Java experience, you should get another book. At least another book in addition to this one. This is not one of those books that starts off by showing you how to plug in your computer, it assumes that you have some Java programming experience. But if you are like me, a self-taught Java programmer that would like to learn how to program applications for Android as a hobby, this book is perfect. It may not be easy, there are chapters that you may have to read more than once, but as long as you know some basic Java, there is nothing in the book that should seem impossible to understand. The fact that the first word in title of the book is "Beginning" should tell you that this book might not be the only book you'll ever need, if you are going to do some serious Android programming. It gives you a good start, but you will not end up as an Android expert. For instance, it doesn't cover things like graphics, sound or video in any detail.
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