Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (Big Nerd Ranch Guides) 3rd Edition

Excellent book! Before picking it up, I had a decent understanding of Java but little understanding of Android development. This book has been really helpful at teaching me some of the core concepts of creating applications for the Android OS. I believe you'll get the best out of this book by completing it from front to back, including the challenges at the end of each chapter. This will not only give you a reference to concepts in plain text, but it will also provide you with actual code to compile and run in Android Studio. Navigating the code will help abstract concepts become practical and memorable. That said, this book will not make you an Android guru. Instead, it will provide you with a solid foundation to build upon. I was fortunate enough to work for an awesome company that allowed me to read through this book at work and I believe it paid off tremendously.

As an experienced software engineer but new to the Android system I found this book to be an excellent introduction. I'd attempted to pick up the system organically by installing the dev environment and working through some tutorials. But Android is not a simple development environment. The IDE has a million buttons and the underlying project has tons of config files. Then of course there are all the Android SDKs etc etc.This book eases you into the system with simple examples and then takes the time to explain what's important in the supporting infrastructure. I feel much more informed about the whole thing and confident that the project I need to port will be successful.I should also note that Big Nerd Ranch published an introduction to Cocoa development that I relied on (almost 15 years ago!) to make the switch to Mac OS X development. Good to see that the quality of their instructional texts is still top notch!

I owned this version and 2nd Ed. It's a good book overall but I think it can be improved in following areas:1. Code examples: Code examples are good but they lack of coherence. For example, when teaching Fragment, the authors are trying to tell readers what to do but the codes are piece by piece, I have to read back to remind myself what's going on within a class. I think the better way will be post the whole class out at the beginning of the chapter then walk through the code line by line or class by class. Also, the author should tell the user about the API of android class, such as Intent(), LayoutInflator class etc. This book simply uses the methods without mentioning too much about the parameters in the methods.2. Download code: the code repo for this book has some errors. The gradle settings of the code are from the author, I have to change the build.gradle to make downloaded code work. Ideally, it should be mentioned in code repo or in the book.

Bought this book as supplemental reading for a course in Software Engineering. This book has played a key role in helping to understand Android app development. So far, the applications built in this book are specific enough to keep me engaged in the content and easy to extend to applications outside the book. It also helps that the book has been an easy read. I feel like I just got the book a few weeks ago and I'm already marching on page 227 and feeling good.

As a software developer transitioning to becoming an Android Developer, this book is Fantastic and so helpful. They take the time to explain so much about Why you are doing a certain action, not just How to do a certain action. This to everyone who wrote this book! You have helped me greatly!

I usually hate textbooks, I enjoy this one. In college I refused to buy/read required textbooks. This book goes step by step of absolutely everything you need to know, even things like how to turn in developer mode on your phone in order to put your apps onto your device.

good starter book for people getting into Android Dev, not for existing developersHad i not written my name on the book (which i do it all the time), I would have returned it

I've read several hundred pages now and it's really well written. It's packed with best practices and insights that it would have taken months of experience to gain otherwise. It tries to keep rather dry topics fun as you work through well written examples (that actually work).