The big disadvantage of Androidprogrammierung is the high complexity of the necessary development environment Eclipse along with the so-called Android SDK and various other still necessary tools. Unfortunately, if you do not versed in addition to the object-oriented programming, then leads a fairly long and winding road to the first app :-(
As our mechatronics students are not computer science students, this usual way already comes to Android app itself for reasons of time out of the question.
But exactly where this book:
The core theme of this book - the Processing Development Environment - is the full-fledged replacement for Eclipse to achieve the essential learning objectives in terms of app programming:
- How the user interaction via a monitor works.
- How to create simple animation.
- How internal sensors reads.
- To communications with external microcontrollers via Bluetooth.
In the book step by step shows how you can create with simple means without Java knowledge and without computer science expertise Android Apps. This starts with simple interactive graphic gimmicks and ends at almost professional apps that access databases.
The many examples build on each other and to the end of the book ever more complex.
As a single detail content I only connect to the physical computing missing, can communicate eg like a smartphone with an Arduino microcontroller (see, for example Making Things Talk of T. Igoe).
But the book is also valuable for those who want to go the professional route of Androidentwicklung further at the end: All examples can be exported as Eclipse projects, so that you have learned nothing and nothing can seamlessly delve deeper into the subject.
Very successful, I find at the beginning of the book comparing Processing in Java mode (the app runs then on the PC) to Android mode (source code itself runs on a smartphone). This is very well shown didactically the similarity of smartphones to PCs.
Unlike the iPhone Android devices are very heterogeneous world of their built-up electronics. For this reason, one should not expect this book is that all the examples on any Android smartphone or tablet the same, run the same well or at all. On my Motorola Defy + run as the camera apps not (although in forums is a known issue).
For this reason, I am sorry to dampen somewhat the great enthusiasm of the author in terms of equipment or version independence.
If you come as a lecturer on such issues, then they are sometimes resolved by some internet research. For students such problems are very very frustrating.
This is the other side of the coin: On the one hand a processing decreases the feeling thousand necessary settings under Eclipse. On the other hand you have with processing but almost no way to find a mistake in one app.
My conclusion: For (well-prepared by the lecturer) student projects, this book is very good. For entry into the Androidprogrammierung (without much computer science-knowledge), this book is the most painless option of many Android entry-level textbooks.
To create largely bug-free apps that run on as many Android devices, but it comes to the development under Eclipse not around at the end. But this, this book is at least a good start.
