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Learning Android – Marko Gargenta

January 27th, 2014

Learning Android is a book published by O’Reilly, recently updated with newer content in its 2nd Edition.

The first edition was published in March 2011 with the following content:

What’s Inside
Chapter 1, Android Overview
Is an introduction to Android and its history
Chapter 2, The Stack
Is an overview of the Android operating system and all its parts from a very high
level
Chapter 3, Quick Start
Helps you set up your environment for Android application development
Chapter 4, Main Building Blocks
Explains the Android components application developers use to put together an app
Chapter 5, Yamba Project Overview
Explains the Yamba application that we’ll build together through this book and
use as an example to learn Android’s various features
Chapter 6, Android User Interface
Explains how to build the user interface for your application
Chapter 7, Preferences, the Filesystem, the Options Menu, and Intents
Covers some of the operating system features that make an application developer’s
life easier
Chapter 8, Services
Covers building an Android service to process background tasks
Chapter 9, The Database
Explains the Android framework’s support for the built-in SQLite database and
how to use it to persist the data in your own application
Chapter 10, Lists and Adapters
Covers an important feature of Android that allows large data sets to be linked
efficiently to relatively small screens
Chapter 11, Broadcast Receivers
Explains how to use the publish-subscribe mechanism in Android to respond to
various system and user-defined messages
Chapter 12, Content Providers
Shows how to design a content provider to share data between applications, in this
case using it to enable our app widget to display data on the home screen
Chapter 13, System Services
Introduces various system services that an app developer can tap into
Chapter 14, The Android Interface Definition Language
Covers building an inter-process communication mechanism to allow for remote
access to a service from another application
Chapter 15, The Native Development Kit (NDK)
Introduces how to write native C code as part of your Android application

The book is a good reference to learn Android development, as a supplement to online references.
You can develop an Android app just by going through forums, internet articles and most importantly Android Developers website.
However, nothing beats having a book, at least for me.

Learning Android expects you to know the basics of Java, XML and Eclipse IDE.

If you have the above basics, then this book can be easily followed because it shows you step-by-step how to build a simple application using all the features that the Android platform provides.
Diving deeper into each subject or chapter will be on your own accord but nevertheless this book gives enough guidance for you to have a clear understanding of the Android platform.

While the author has now joined Twitter University, the book’s related source code is still available online.

About Author

Marko is the director of Twitter University, where he manages the training of Twitter Engineers in Android and other open source technologies. Previously he was co-founder of Marakana (acquired by Twitter), a firm that trained thousands of Android developers at Intel, Cisco, Qualcomm, Motorola, the Department of Defense, and other institutions. Marko is also the creator of Android Bootcamp course and co-founder of San Francisco Android Users’ Group.

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