I’m new to android development. I’ve skimmed over few chapter. I have another Android book called Professional Android Application Development. I looked at the second book at the same time. I’ve found

the other book more helpful for me. It has more information and simpler to follow.
Rating: 3 / 5

I purchased this series of book for the ridiculous price of $35 and would have gladly paid three times as much. Mark is a great writer and the example code is solid. Moreover, he actually replies to email! If you are learning Android, this series of books is a must have.

Peace,

Scott
Rating: 5 / 5

I first bought Professional Android Application Development and thought it was pretty good as I went through it. However I realized when I started trying to write my own apps that there were huge areas left uncovered in that book. I turned to the online docs but found them to be very skimpy and had several problems I was just stuck with.

Out of desperation I bought this book and have found its coverage to be much much more detailed and helpful than either the online docs or my first Android book.

I think for people who really want to dig below the surface and do more than just simple toy examples, some additional help is needed and this book seems perfect.
Rating: 4 / 5

I feel I benefited from the author’s experience and motivation, and I was reassured by his awareness of other development systems. The level of detail is about right.

A few chapters were obviously thin, probably due to the newness of those parts of the API, but I’m glad that he didn’t try to pad them out to make them look more substantial. Honesty is important in developer documentation.

However, I was constantly annoyed by the flippant sub-headings. Sub-section titles that actually described the sub-section would provided a sense of structure, allowing me to skim through when necessary. If the author feels that the humorous (but meaningless) titles are that important, he could just keep them as secondary titles in a smaller font size. If a real Editor was involved in this book then I am surprised that he allowed that.
Rating: 4 / 5

Book is easy to read even for non native English speaker like me. There is a lot of good samples. Code is fore SDK 1.0. Now we have 1.5, but other Android’s books are more out of date. It’s also important Mark Murphy is active posting on android developers group and his post are often very helpful.
Rating: 5 / 5