With hundreds of available books, tutorials, and online courses from around the world, one wonders why new books on popular subjects like Android development even exist. Reading this book may reveal a few answers.

Like practitioners of most programming languages, Android followers can be categorized into three broad categories: beginner/wannabe, intermediate/entrepreneur, and advanced/9-5 Android developers. The author of this book in my opinion has created something useful for the first two categories, and the advanced folks would also find it handy for quick reference.

As the name suggests, the book is set up more like a programming lab where the instructor walks the learners through various topics with the help of examples. The writing is clear, typographical errors minimal, and code well formatted so the reader can easily understand the example and topic covered in the chapter. The only complaint I have is with the examples used and more importantly the lack of summaries in the form of best practices that the reader can use while developing apps outside the lab for audiences around the world. Localization (for adopting the apps to different languages and styles) is not a key topic discussed in the book.

The volume is divided into eight chapters, which in turn comprise 10 to 20 topics each. Chapters 1 to 7 cover various areas within the Android software development kit (SDK), and the last chapter introduces the native development kit (NDK) and RenderScript to help with native functions and performance enhancement considerations.

In order of importance for Android users, chapter 1 starts with layouts and views since deciding the theme and overall design of the app usually comes first. Chapter 2 goes a step forward into user interaction and covers topics like orientation, dialog boxes, BACK behavior, and complex touch events.

Chapter 3 is quite important since it covers all aspects of communications and networking for the app. Examples on accessing application programming interfaces (APIs), short message service (SMS) delivery, near field communication (NFC), and universal serial bus (USB) connections are also covered.

Chapter 4 looks at interacting with hardware and media on the device, and chapter 5 looks at handling data. Locations, images, video, audio, and accelerometers are used extensively these days, so a few examples on each are helpful. Chapter 6 consists of examples like notifications, tasks, application switching, and AppWidgets, among others. Finally, chapter 7 brings the reader back to visuals, covering graphics and drawings.

For serious moneymaking apps like games and enterprise software, portability, core accessibility, and performance are big objectives. For them, the NDK offers a C/C++ toolset for implementing parts of the app in native mode. Google released RenderScript to help Android apps that require better performance than normal. Although it drives up complexity, multicore programming has lots of benefits for many commercial apps. The examples in this chapter are quite basic and included only to illustrate specific points.

Overall, this book is more of a lab companion than an instruction manual. It can be used as a quick reference to check on a few things related to the above topics and to leverage some well-known practices to make the development experience faster and stronger.