Comments about O'Reilly Media App Inventor:

Nowadays, in this fast, ever-changing world, people are either too lazy to create wonderful applications or they can simply be too busy to code one. It can be true for all mobile application hobby developers like me. Be it on the Android, BlackBerry, or iOS (in alphabetical order, that is), you may have the brightest of idea, but cannot find the proper amount of time to code and make that into a working application.

App Inventor for Android is part of Google Labs that lets you build different kinds of applications for your mobile device. You do not need to be a professional developer to use App Inventor, as it does not require you to write code (hard-coded) but instead let's you visually design the way the app will look like and let's you specify on how it will behave by using blocks. Cool, isn't it?

Since the App Inventor came from Google Labs, you can be assured of vast resources that you can tap freely from the web, not to mention from the official mailing lists and discussion boards sprawling all around the worldwide web.

If you're a hobby developer, like me, and would like to get a hands-on experience developing Android applications, this book is for you.

Comments about O'Reilly Media App Inventor:

If you prefer a good reference by your side, you might want to get this book. Not only this book was written by the developers of App Inventor team, they also know how to explain things the simplest way possible. This book covers a plenty of tutorials from beginners to intermediate with step by step instructions for you to follow. If you do all the tutorials provided in the book, you can move forward without any problem.

Comments about O'Reilly Media App Inventor:

I have been learning to use App Inventor since I first got a smart phone about six months ago. This book is a much needed learning text for App Inventor. It teaches by having you build examples apps with each one getting a little harder and introducing new concepts.
It starts with Hello Purr, a variation of Hello World. The book makes even this well-known app fun because of a couple of variations it throws in.
In the meantime it explains everything step by step and teaches useful programming practices like testing often, in fact each time you add something new to your program.
The chapters are all well illustrated including a few fun photographs of real people illustrating something about the app.
The book is divided into two main sections. The first section, thankfully, is all the fun apps which you build and learn by doing.
The second section, called Inventor's Manual, is also very interesting when you are ready for it. It discusses issues from a programmers point of view with suggestions on incremental development and similar helpful programming design tips.
It also includes an in depth discussion of all the features, components, and blocks in App Inventor.
The two sections of the book, the tutorials and the Inventor's Manual together provide far more coherent and approachable documentation for App Inventor than Google's on-line documentation.
For anyone who craves a little structure in their learning, I highly recommend this book.