I’ve now finished working through my first book on Android Development – ‘Beginning Android Application Development’ by Wrox.

This book has given me a good introduction to Android development and I’d definitely recommend this book to those beginning Android Development. I really like the way its all based around coding examples, which all give working examples that you can run in the Android emulator, so you can see your coding at work straight away. If you then want to tweak the examples a little more you can and can see the effects straight away.

One slight issue was that the latest version of Android SDK is v4.x and the book is from the time of v2.3 so there are some issues when using the examples from the book. Using the Wrox P2P forums you can get answers to most issues and once I’d found a few problems early on I then knew how to get around them.

One main problem was the name of the application icon file – called icon in 2.3 but now ic_launcher – and there are other similar issues.

Next book to work through is ‘Android for Programmers’ – from the Deitel Developer Series. This book contains 16 fully coded Android apps, giving explanations of how various functionality has been achieved. Apps areas include – Twitter searches, slideshow, quiz, games, calculator, drawing, weather and pizza ordering(!)