Android User Interface Development is a book totally dedicated to show how to create user interfaces for mobile applications based on Google Android OS. The book is written by Jason Morris and it is published by Packt Publishing.
The book is based on an pragmatic approach and this means that readers could learn the basics in the first part and then they could improve their skills in the last part discussing about themes.
Readers will find many step-by-step instructions to build some useful features with realistic examples.
Taking a look at the table of contents of the book you can realise that in the first section all the basics concepts are explained, starting from a project with linear process to a project with a non-linear interface.
In the first part of the book readers will learn how to download and setup the Android SDK and how to test the emulator. Then the book immedially starts with the first useful topic about how to create an user interaction (Activity).
In this first section the book discusses about the screen layout and the XML layout file that is the most important file to build your own UI in Android. Then readers will see how to enrich their layouts using other objects as buttons or improving styles with some advanced options.
In the next section of the first chapter you will learn how to implement your own Java controller to get data from your activity.
The first chapter explains many topics and correctly introduce all the important steps to follow for building your own UI. The book continues showing how to present all the data using your own views and how to use some widgets available in Android as tabs, galleries and ratingbars.
Another important section is dedicated to a very useful example about how to implement a music store to show how to create content centric interactions. This is a good example that will help readers to understand very well how to create from scratch a real interface and how to organize all the activities in the screen.
I would like to conclude this review sharing that this book is dedicated to newbie Android developers that started to work not so far, I can say that this book is a great contribution for all of these developers that need to create a good user interface.
But I think that this book it could be also useful for all the other developers that would like to know all the capabilities of interfaces in Android.
The book has a good readability and I think that the table of contents is well structured. In conclusion highly suggested for any Android developers.
A sample chapter is freely provided by Packt Publishing and you can take a look at all the content in the book using the table of contents.
I would like to thank Packt Publishing to provide me a printed copy of the book.