What's the best book to learn programming on Android?

Question

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Can anyone recommend a good Beginner Android programming book?

When I was in college about 20 years ago I used to program a lot (Basic, Pascal, COBOL, Fortran). I dabbled a little bit in VisualBASIC about five years go, but it was really a hack. Now, I really have a burning desire to write some applications for my Android phone, but I really don't know anything about all the new programming technologies (OOP etc). I'm looking for a good book that will teach me modern programming using Java and the Android platform. I've seen good books on learning Java 6 and some good books on programming Android (but they all seem to assume you know Java or C), but nothing that seems to combine the two. I'd really like to learn Java right on the Android platform to begin with if possible. I know there are a lot of resources available online but unfortunately much of the time that I will spend on this endeavor is when I won't have internet access so a good book would go a long way. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I think you might want to take it one step at a time. The Android Framework is not a programming language, it uses one. To use Android you need to learn Java.

Books are old fashioned. The Java Tutorials is an extreamly good resource for learning everything about Java.

For Android, you have the Developer docs, but the bulk of your knowledge is going to come from asking questions and Google, since the docs don't seem to cover everything

And if you don't want to do everything online? The Java Tutorials are downloadable here. The Android Docs can be spidered with any web spider program.

Answer 2

Honestly the best book I've read is the set of 3 books from Commonware. You pay $40 and get access to the ebooks for life, however they are continually updated so you can get new versions for a year without paying again for the next edition. You can also get them as print editions if you prefer.

They are the clearest books I've read about android and help me a lot. There's also a GitHub repository with all the code used in the book.

http://commonsware.com/

Another great place to learn if you don't want a book is the Google I/O sessions. They are fairly long (each one is an hour) but very in-depth and informative.

2010 - http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions.html#Android
2009 - http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions.html#mobile

Answer 3

Regarding Java in general, "Thinking in Java" by Bruce Eckel may be a nice choice.