Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack: Build Better, Safer Android Apps

As a newbie to Android development, I bought this looking for easy to follow step by step guides that would help me build my understanding of the process and the framework. I have an idea for an app that I wish to develop - but I want to learn my way around and some good practices before I get into it too deeply. I have extensive programming experience - although most of it is from quite some time ago - and I'm not particularly familiar with modern IDEs. From reading around the web and doing some of the basic tutorials, I decided that Jetpack seems to be the way to go - and I bought this book with that in mind. I'm disappointed - if I had done no previous learning I would be completely lost. As it is, I followed the steps in chapter 1 and immediately ran into trouble. I went to the forum for pragmatic programmers and it was of no help. I downloaded the code from the provided link - and that wasn't much help either. After messing about a bit I managed to get things to work - but I'm disheartened. It turned out that something on page 8 uses a variable that isn't defined until page 18 - despite the suggestion that the app should build and run. Android development is a steep learning curve and I really expected this book to do a lot more handholding. Instead there is a lot of jumping around - sometimes being told what to do and sometimes having to figure it out. It seems to be assumed that you already know your way around Android Studio. Part of the problem is that Android keeps being updated, so things go out of date very quickly - but this is a new book so I would expect to be able to edit the files as described and have things work. Also, having discovered Composer (part of jetpack) for UI development I was expecting this book to cover it - but no such luck. I would suggest road testing books like this with the intended audience before publishing. I shall persevere, but it's not proving to be the joyful experience suggested in the introduction!

Haven't read the book yet, but certainly not appreciated that secondhand book sells as a new one.

I have done some introductory Android development in the past and wanted to both brush up and dig deeper this time. I do not have experience with kotlin but have some experience with Scala, Java, python. So I entered the book with some real-world programming experience, but do not consider myself a Thought Leader in programming. I found the book to be very good. Noteworthy: I had to pay attention; skipping ahead to the code snippets will end up skipping some actual coding or confusing which file the adjustments need to be made, etc. But he does take the time to point out interesting nuances with kotlin or with the various data binding tie-ins, which are helpful. I could see how an inexperienced programmer might have trouble ingesting those asides, though, because there is some basic assumed knowledge (for example pointing out how certain syntax will prevent or handle a NullPointerException). The pacing is good as well, and the way concepts build upon one another as the text moves is a nice way to learn, and to reinforce learning along the way. The source code comes in handy, too, as it's laid out in per-chapter folders. I've referenced that multiple times when a concept or syntax seems a bit out of reach to me. I should point out that there are one or two things that have changed in Android Studio in the short time since this has been published, so the first chapter ended up having some of those very foundational, basic errors that I had to work past. The book doesn't know about these (although there are appendices that I did not reference for those errors, to be truthful). So again, if you have experience troubleshooting those odd errors that come up when starting a new development project, then you can probably get going without too much grief. Overall I found this to be a great fit for me, a person with programming experience that wanted to better understand Android development.

Am Beispiel zweier größerer Apps möchte der Autor gleich zwei Dinge gleichzeitig vermitteln - Kotlin als Programmiersprache und das Android SDK zur Erstellung von Android Apps. Das gelingt für jemanden, der schon Erfahrung in der Programmierung im Allgemeinen und idealerweise im Android-Bereich hat, recht gut. Anfänger dürften sich allerdings schnell abgehängt fühlen oder brauchen viel Referenzmaterial um dann wirklich zu verstehen, was in den einzelnen Schritten getan wird. Insbesondere da der Autor dazu neigt, bei Kotlin immer die „coole Art“ etwas syntaktisch auszudrücken bevorzugt, obwohl weniger syntaktischer Zucker leichter verständlichen Code ergeben würde. Mein Fazit also: Entwickler mit Erfahrung sollten zugreifen, Einsteiger finden Werke mit einem leichteren Einstieg.

I just love First Head's style of teaching. First Head's Kotlin book, and all the other other books I have that they put out work really well for me. After each chapter I find that the information stays embedded in my memory as the format, fun asides, and exercises really work for remembrance. Thanks guys and gals!

It was not bad but it confused me at times.

Android Studio and Android libraries have changed so much this book is useless for a beginner. Lots of things just don't work.