Comments about O'Reilly Media Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

Author needs to try what he preaches on other platforms. Also, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9781449383268 as listed in several places in the book only includes Ch2 thru Ch4 examples. No Ch 7 (Jonathan: see page 110. Where's Ch7 'this chapter' code?).

Comments about O'Reilly Media Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

Can't add much more than the rest of the 'Cons' reviewers - i really wanted to enjoy this book but its lousy. Unstructured, misleading and untested in most browsers other than the one the author is using. If you have enough time to put a 1-line .txt file note in the zip download directory telling us you are aware of the errors then please take the time to actually fix the errors and upload the example code again!! Maybe if authors weren't paid until the quality of their book was verified then books like this wouldn't make it onto the shelves. DREADFUL

Comments about O'Reilly Media Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

Obviously, the author uses a Mac. If you are a windows dev you won't get it to work. Book has not been tested. Waste of time and money. Now I have got to get another book

Comments about O'Reilly Media Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

Its been a long time since I wrote any code and this was a gentle way to get back into it using the exciting Android platform. I had to do a ton of tedious debugging, mostly because of my typos, but was able to get most things to work. I am still looking for code described as 9781449383268, which is supposed to be on the book site. Nevertheless, this book really helped me to get back in the coding game and I truly appreciate J Stark for this.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

I really have to say this book has everything a great development book should have, very readable, tons of code, links to useful websites, walkthroughs for setting up your environments, etc. It is indeed a great step by step guide to turning your HTML websites into almost-native Android Apps in a very short time.

The author assumes you have good working knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript, in fact the whole point of the book is to teach you how to leverage that knowledge for building native Android Apps without having to learn additional technologies like Java or Eclipse. That being said you certainly don't have to be an expert, as the book also includes a crash course and some basic info as technologies are introduced on each of the chapters.

Even being an Android specific book, I'm sure I'm not the only one who had an epiphany mid-book about applying these technologies for iPhone development, and in fact is possible! All these technologies are standards based and not limited to the Android ecosystem. That reason alone makes this book "double great", since you're not only getting a guide to building Android Apps, but you're also getting a head start for doing the same for the iPhone and Apple's App Store all in one book!

Although I'm enthusiastic about the book, it's far from perfect. it does feel sometime as an on-line tutorial and the author recurs to repetition a bit too much for my taste. Again beginner users might find this very valuable, but for professional devs it might be a little frustrating even if you can easily skim through those sections. I'm also on the fence about the code provided on the book's website, I find that a finished version of the code projects would've been a great addition.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

Well, I really, really like the thesis of the book: Build a good web app instead of many native apps. But like so much code, it seems like the code in this book has already gone stale. The code in chapters 2, 3, and 4 doesn't work correctly on my Samsung Fascinate (Android 2.1) in either the built-in browser or Opera. After updating the JQTouch library from the git repo I was able to get better, but not good-enough behavior on the built-in browser for Chapter 4.

Does this say that the approach promoted here is just way too fragile?

Comments about O'Reilly Media Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

One of the the aspects that I appreciated about this book was the focus on incorporating lttle touches in your web application that make the application feel more like an Android application. Chapter 2: Basic Styling includes a section on adding the Android look and feel and the chapter on Animation adds extra features. Noting that when Android users drill down into a list, the page slides off to the left. The book also includes sections on using client-side storage to allow your application to be used offline.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

I like the book and the concept of mobile web apps, but into the 3rd chapter the code samples do not show the same results I see in the book, and that's the reason I only give it 3 stars. There's a readme file included with the download that says that the samples are being revised. I hope they fixed the errors.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

I tried to follow the guidelines for downloading and running phonegap. I ran into tons of problems. seems to me that this book has not been tested very good - and at least not by windows-users. Just one little example: the version of phonegap to download is obviously not the one the author used when writing the book. I had to go find an other version to get access to the bat-files descriped in the book.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

The idea behind the concept of Web Apps is quite simple and interesting - to allow to create apps without bothering to learn the mobile platform specific SDKs (iOS or Android usually).

A mobile platform provides two ways to access applications - native apps and web apps. A native app can get at the special hardware in Android/iOS, uses the SDK and it can be sold in the app store. A web app, on the other hand, can't use the hardware, can't be sold in the app store but it is much easier to create.

The main focus of this book is to customize your website/apps to look good on an Android powered device. So, basically, you create the customized versions of the applications/websites for mobile from your knowledge of basic page creation technologies i.e. HTML, CSS and Javascript.

This book also shows the use of these along with jQuery and WebKit browser. There is an intrdouction to HTML5 (Local Storage and WebSQL database). 2 chapters are devoted to understanding and working with PhoneGap frmaework. You would enjoy working with PhoneGAp for using the accelerometer, making the phone buzz and using geolocation options.

If you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you already have the tools you need to develop Web Apps. There is a basic introduction to HTML, CSS and Javascript in book. However, this book would benefit those with a good working knowledge of these web technologies. If you are not comfortable at these, you may find yourself a handicap for creating web apps.

Disclosure: I'm writing this post as part of O'Reilly's blogger review program. While I'm not getting paid to review books, I sure am getting to read them for free.