* Welcome David & Dawn Griffiths

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

This week, we're delighted to have David & Dawn Griffiths helping to answer questions about the new book Head First Android.
See the table of contents

The promotion starts Tuesday, November 30th, 2021 and will end on Friday, December 3rd, 2021

We'll be selecting four random posters in this forum to win a free copy of the book provided by the publisher, O'Reilly.


Image from https://m.media-amazon.com

Please see the Book Promotion page to ensure your best chances at winning!

Posts in this welcome thread are not eligible for the drawing, and should be reserved for welcoming the author. Questions posted in this topic are subject to removal.

[Randy Tong]

Welcome to Ranch !

[Granit Berisha]

Hi,
Thanks for this awesome book, I read all the table content headings and I must say its a great cover, but I wanted more, especially in tests.
I saw that you covered in the end a bit, but I want more, do you plan to have another book with testing in Android, or which book do you recommend mastering testing in Android?

Thanks.

[David Griffiths]

Hello everyone! Glad to be back in the Ranch once more!

[David Griffiths]

Hello Granit,

We do look at testing in the "Leftovers" section at the end, but sadly it never made it to a chapter in the book, simply because of space. The book weighs in at 890 pages, and I think O'Reilly was concerned that learners might suffer some sort of injury if they tried to life a larger book!

That said, testing is an *excellent* topic, and we're looking at creating some videos about it in the near future. Jetpack Compose is a particularly interesting area to test, because it has a whole new way of testing. Built upon the semantic tree structure (the same thing that's used to make Compose application accessible) it's possible to test and entire application end-to-end, but also to test individual components/composables, without the need to run them on a device.

Could we ask a favor? If you *really* would like to see more about Android testing (and we would *love* to do more on it...) could you contact O'Reilly Media and say how much you would love to learn more? It genuinely has an effect, and it is much easier for us to argue for providing more books, tutorials and courses if there has been requests for content.

Hope you enjoy the book!

D+D

[Geoff McKay]

Hi David and Dawn. I've been looking for a book on App Dev, and I was happy to see your book is part of the "Head First" series of books. I have read other books from this series, and the visual nature of the "Head First" books is very engaging. I look forward to reading your book, and it's very timely with this being just released now. (3rd edition). It looks like a great way to learn App Dev with Kotlin. Thanks for your hard work in developing this new release of your book.

[Raghavendra Desoju]

Hi David & Dawn,

Thank you very much for writing this book. I love the "Head First" series.

Can we expect the same level of fun and interest with this book as that of `Head First Java` book?

Thanks,
Raghu

[David Griffiths]

Thanks, Geoff!

Yes it is an exciting to be working on Android. Jetpack Compose, particularly, it going to have a tremendous effect on people's productivity.

We hope you enjoy the book

D+D

[David Griffiths]

Hello Raghavendra,

We certainly hope so! Plus this is one of the first books in the series to use the new design. We hope you enjoy the new visuals

D+D

[Tim Cooke]

A gentle reminder to everyone posting questions in this thread

Book Promotion Rules wrote:Posts in this welcome thread are not eligible for the drawing, and should be reserved for welcoming the author.

[Sebastian Makowiecki]

Welcome!

[David Griffiths]

Hi Sebastian! <waves/>

[Oguz Han Turan]

Hi everyone,

The 'Head First' series is the best series of programming at the beginning. My favorite one is Head First Design Pattern. I believe that this book also awesome and perfect.
I wish good luck everyone.

[David Griffiths]

Thanks, Oguz!

[Giovanni Montano]

Hi compliments for the book, the index looks quite exciting because I can see you are aware of the difficulty to write this book for the huge complexity of the android ecosystem, but still in the section of what you do not cover link to really key nice insights and most important you get our fantastic fantasy head first hand from the linear layout, to the internals to compose. bravo!

I have to start a new project and have to be really fast, Compose has a learning curve, so I would like to know what are the limits at the moment, namely which views are not ready enough to be built in compose i At this regard I saw you cover the RecyclerView with the DiffUtil mehtod as well that is quite an advaced topic, so in general I am curious about interoperability as well between some feature in compose and interoperability. I really want to learn compose cause I heard Jack Wharton and IntelliJ are trying more o less to make Kotlin Multiplatform integration with compose even for iOS.
Thank you again to make possible an head first updated in Android!

[David Griffiths]

Hello Giovanni,

We don't know the exact requirements of your app, but you should seriously look at Jetpack Compose. It is still interoperable with existing libraries and third party code. The only fundamental restriction is that you need to use Kotlin, and the minimum API is 21. That is currently supported by about 98% of devices.

Some libraries are still in beta (for example, the Compose library for navigation) but are looking really solid.

We think that it will take you a day or two to get used to creating apps with Compose, but once you do, you will create code far more rapidly. You will also be able to break your application up into far smaller components, which you will be able to design and test in a more straightforward fashion.

Good luck!

D+D