Books

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(!)

Continuing learning Android Development using the book ‘Beginning Android Application Development’ from Wrox.

Today, completed Chapter 11 – Publishing Android Applications.

This featured:

- How to prepare your apps for deployment
- Exporting your app as an APK file and signing it with a new certificate
- How to distribute your Android app
- Publishing your Android app on the Android Market

Useful information in this Chapter, though I’m not really ready to publish any Android apps yet.

Continuing learning Android Development using the book ‘Beginning Android Application Development’ from Wrox.

Yesterday, completed Chapter 10 – Developing Android Services.

This featured:

- Reasons for needing a service
- Creating services that run in the background
- How to perform long-running tasks in a separate thread
- How to perform repeated tasks in a service
- How an activity and a service communicate

Continuing learning Android Development using the book ‘Beginning Android Application Development’ from Wrox.

Just completed Chapter 9 – Location-Based Services -

This featured:

- displaying Google Maps in your Android application
- obtaining a Google Maps API key
- using MapView in your app – from com.google.android.maps.MapView
- get the address location touched on the map by user
- how to perform geocoding and reverse geocoding
- obtaining geographical data using GPS, mobile triangulation, wi-fi triangulation
- monitoring for a location
- using DDMS in Eclipse to alter GPS location inside your Android emulator, so you can trigger location monitoring

Continuing learning Android Development using the book ‘Beginning Android Application Development’ from Wrox.

Now working on Chapter 8 – Messaging and Networking – currently looking at Networking and downloading binary data, such as bitmaps. This Chapter also features Web services, so that will be good to see, as that looks to be one of best areas for Mobile apps – consume web services and do something useful/interesting with the resulting data.

Glad I started looking at Android, it looks a versatile platform and the fact its a Java based development platform is also good, as it still provides plenty of Java coding practice, just in a different device/platform to usual Windows/Unix environment.

Worked through Chapter 7 – Content Providers

Looked at using Content Providers and also creating your own Content Providers.

Also worked through Chapter 6 – Data Persistence

Looked at storing data in Android – mainly 3 ways – 1) with shared preference object 2) using traditional file systems 3) using relational database (SQLite)

Have worked through Chapter 5 – Displaying Pictures and Menus with Views