Book Review of Instant Android Fragmentation How-To

Yep, another book review!  This one was a shorter one, and sounded interesting, so it was easy to dive right in.  It didn’t cover what I thought it would, though if you read the table of contents, it’s pretty clear what you’re getting.  The book is Instant Android Fragmentation How-To by Gianluca Pacchiella.

I was expecting more on UI concerns from the title, but this book covers four very specific topics: the compatibility package, fragments, the loader (for HTTP operations), and the ActionBar.

The most interesting to me was the good explanation of the loader and the use of threads.  I had to deal with this before for loading JSON data, and kinda dove in.  It would have been nice to have this book months ago!  Anyway – the author Gianluca Pacchiella does a great job explaining the UI thread and what not to do to lock up your app.

I also appreciated the explanation and dive into ActionBarSherlock.  I had only heard about this before as it’s mentioned in various tutorials, and didn’t realize it was a nice open-source Android 4 component that allows us to reach back to Gingerbread.  “Instant Android Fragmentation How-To” gets very code and project heavy with this and the compatibility package.  So – when sitting down with these sections, make sure to pick up your laptop, or at least avoid the e-book and skip right to the website of PDF where the code is legible.

I was a little confused with the end of the book – Gianluca just drops you off at the ActionBar and doesn’t summarize or wrap up to finish off the book.  I was convinced I had a corrupted e-book, but nope…it just ends.

Anyway this 66 page book is a good quick read, with some good code examples to grab – just make absolutely sure that you’re interested in those 4 topics listed in the table of contents, or you’ll be disappointed!

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