Digital Vortex A-Go-Go

Earlier this week two books arrived that I had ordered on Amazon UK. They are Beginning Android 4 (ISBN13: 978-1-4302-3984-0) and Pro Android 4 (ISBN13: 978-1-4302-3930-7).

I’ve already started reading the first one and so far I’m relatively content with the book. That is, the presented material is easy to follow (seeing that I have a solid Java background) and the information is presented in a logical order. I also like writing style of the author. As far as I can tell, all the basics are covered, including both things you need to know and thing you don’t actually need to know (IMHO).

But so far the book has not been very challenging because there simply aren’t any exercises or quizes to complete. One can simply read the book without having a computer nearby. So, to make sure all the new information ‘sticks’ is to maybe read texts a couple of time. And probably simply perform the steps in the book yourself.

The book does use Eclipse as the IDE of choice, but also provides instructions/hints for using the console tools supplied by the Android SDK. It also mentions MOTODEV, a complete development bundle comprised of Eclipse plus Android SDK and such.

Bonus tip: when working on a project, at one point it might be the case that the automatically generated class ‘R’ doesn’t match the contents of the XML-files anymore. To resolve: try to solve all compile errors if they exists. If that does not help, you can additionally try to ‘Clean’ the project (choose ‘Clean’ in the ‘Project’ menu).