(Part 3) Top products from r/androiddev

Every project is made up of different people and they all have their own vibe. For the last 10 years, at least part of my job has been working in and managing people who work on open source. I and my team have contributed to AOSP, Eclipse, Apache, and others.

A random collection of unordered thoughts...

1. Start a dialog on their communication channel and ask if they will accept your help. Some projects aren't interested in help and just ignore external PRs. There are tons of projects that actively encourage participation.
   
2. If a project has an alpha-asshole, nothing you can do will make them better. You will always be playing in his sandbox. Yes, I'm saying he's an asshole, but his impact is immense. My advice is to learn the no-asshole rule and apply it to your own projects in the future.
   
3. If you find a project you really like but they aren't working with you, fork away. The best revenge is making a project better than the original. Not naming any names.
   
4. Learn the git workflow and how to merge, rebase, and amend. Especially if you're going to be working around the edges. The main committers aren't going to want to work around your PRs, especially if there is a lot of unnecessary commits in there that require them to manually merge.
   
5. Don't do wide-ranging changes (e.g. refactoring) without telling the main contributors. Getting in on a Monday and finding that 40% of your code base has changed is an unwelcome surprise.
   
6. Understand semantic versioning
   
7. Offer to handle release tasks. It's not code-oriented and has a lot of things to break up the monotony. Granted, it's often ignored by the devs, but if you do the job well, they will appreciate you for it.
   
8. When the time comes and you're running a project, remember what it was like to want to help. Encourage and grow your community.
   

Hey that is the million dollar question. But because software is not an engineering, actually there is no reference book on SW architecture. Certainly there are books talking about this, but usually covering only some aspects and without real application examples.

Notice that in iOS programming the system imposes a great part of the architecture, so these guys are usually less concerned. But in Android we have more freedom, and the API actually encourages really bad practices (thanks Google). Because of this we are all a bit lost. Nowadays layered architecture and MVP seems to be the most popular approach, but then again everybody produces a different implementation...

Specifically for Clean Architecture you should read its author, Robert C. Martin. AFAIK this is not covered in detail in his books. You can read this blog post and watch this video. Other designs usually coming up in conferences are the Onion Architecture and the Hexagonal Architecture. But make no mistake: there's no route map on how to implement any of those, and examples claiming to follow this or that approach are usually not written by the authors of the architecture.


For DDD there is a very good book by Scott Millet with actual examples. But this style is meant for large enterprise backend apps, and the author himself advices against using is in small apps. So I'd say it is overkill for Android, but of course you could reuse some concepts successfully.


Theres also Software Architecture in Practice 3rd, but having read the 2nd edition I can tell you this is just smoke.


Probably best book to date is Fowler's but this is more a patterns compilation than an architecture guide.

That is a very broad question. To be a good programmer you have to practice (program) a lot and not just the same thing, but various kind of projects and challenges, there are just too many areas to list here and the challenges vary by programming language, operating system to the actual problem domain.

Choose a language or 2 from different paradigms (functional, OOP, structured) and try to solve the same problem in each of them.

You'll also want to spend time doing some reading, some well known books for example:

• The Pragmatic Programmer
  
• Clean Code
  
• The Passionate Programmer
  
  For just the programming aspect you can start trying to solve leet code style questions such as the ones found in Coder Wars or Leet Code
  
  The following book does a much better job at providing an overview of what you can do as a programmer and the available career paths:
  
  
• The Complete Software Developers Career Guide
  
  > And second question backend or mobile development(native) in future?
  
  For this I think you can be a successful professional in either, there are times when you can get away with not needing a "backend" with custom logic and you can just use a data store, but if you ever need to do some centralized processing or computation that requires more resources (memory, CPU) than a typical device can offer there's no escaping the need for backend development. The challenges in the backend are very different to the ones on the frontend (be it native or web based) and the approach is more focused on system design with a bit more traditional Computer Science topics.

You can definitely make good looking apps on your own! Keep in mind, though, that interfaces are about aesthetics AND usability. You don't need any artistic gifts or graphic design skills to create an efficient and usable interface.

I know you're looking for something Android-specific, but I'd recommend starting with The Design of Everyday Things to get a high-level idea of how you should approach design. You might also want to consider watching Sketching and Experience Design, which is a 2007 talk given by Bill Buxton that covers the process of design. He also has an excellent book on sketching UI.

Although old, this book does a very good job explaining the Android architecture https://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Android-Porting-Extending-Customizing/dp/1449308295

Given it was written for Android 4, it doesn't have all the new Treble staff (the basis are still the same, so I think it's still worth reading), but the author has a set of slides that you can read after the book to get the recent changes: https://www.slideshare.net/opersys/presentations

​

Another useful book is https://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Programming-Android-Bringing-Scratch/dp/0134030001 . This one focuses more on getting AOSP running on a new device, and not that much in its internals or customization.

​

Two newer books I have recently found (although I haven't had time to read them) are https://www.amazon.com/Android-System-Programming-customizing-debugging/dp/178712536X (same author as the previous one, content mostly related to building the kernel and getting AOSP running in a new device/emulator) and https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Embedded-Android-N-Programming-ebook/dp/B01841W9AU

They are still pre-treble, but they are probably still useful.

​

Besides those, if you want something more related to internals and not so much on how to "get the source code and build AOSP", you could check https://www.amazon.com/Android-Security-Internals-Depth-Architecture/dp/1593275811 and https://www.amazon.com/Android-Hackers-Handbook-Joshua-Drake/dp/111860864X

Yeah. Designers can be responsible for a lot. Anyways, I started designing for Android before I knew any development. It was hard to learn, because all of the concepts are brand new. So I don't think he will be able to learn well without seeing the results of his work.

Anyways, this book does a great job of tackling native and 9-patch solutions for GUI design. It also explains selectors, which is crucial for a designer to understand. Much more in the book than I'm giving credit for, but it's definitely enough to get started.

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/0321886739/ref=mp_s_a_1_fkmr1_2?qid=1394554598&sr=8-2-fkmr1&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70

Its pretty common to struggle introducing new techniques or technologies in an organization. A good book I enjoyed on the topic was "More Fearless Change" by Linda Rising

https://www.amazon.com/More-Fearless-Change-Strategies-Making/dp/0133966445

Don't give up just yet, keep looking.
Do you have a portfolio? if not try to work on a project of your own so you can have something to show.
And if you are considering improving your java skills try work with libraries like:

• [Dagger2] (https://github.com/google/dagger)
  
• [RxJava] (https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJava)
  
• [Retrofit] (https://github.com/square/retrofit)
  
• [Architecture Components] (https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/index.html)
  
• Kotlin
  
  With spare time I would also recommend you to read:
  
  
• [Clean Architecture] (https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Architecture-Craftsmans-Software-Structure/dp/0134494164)
  
• [Head Frist - Design Patterns] (https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Design-Patterns-Brain-Friendly/dp/0596007124/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510076882&sr=1-5&keywords=Design+patterns)
  
• [The Pragmatic Programmer] (https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master/dp/020161622X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510076924&sr=1-1&keywords=the+pragmatic+programmer)
  

Depending on how skilled you are at Java:

• Effective Java
  
• Java Concurrency in Practice
  
• Java Generics
  
  Then for Android specifically:
  
  
• Efficient Android Threading
  
• Android Concurrency
  
• High Performance Android Apps
  
• Android Databases Best Practices
  

Yes, I actually ended up figuring this out yesterday. Here's how I ended up doing it:

protected Void doInBackground(Void... params) {
//String url = "http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FRDUZXM/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d0_i2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=desktop-4&pf_rd_r=0ZV79CBKAVKNW0RD843D&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=1970566762&pf_rd_i=desktop";
String url = "http://www.amazon.com/VeggieTales-Very-Merry-Larry-Christmas/dp/B00H2T37SO/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_3";
//String url = "http://www.amazon.com/Sony-A7-A7R-Snapshots-Great/dp/0321968603/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_4";
try {
// Connect to the web site
Document document = Jsoup.connect(url)
.userAgent("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1")
.get();
// Get the html document title
Elements trs = document.select("span#priceblock_ourprice");

Element price1 = trs.first();
if(price1 != null)
{
String str1 = price1.text();
System.out.println(str1);
String str2 = str1.replaceAll("[$,]", "");
double aInt = Double.parseDouble(str2);
System.out.println("Price: " + aInt);
}

else
{
Elements price2 = document.select("table.product b.priceLarge");
String priceWithCurrency = price2.text();
System.out.println(priceWithCurrency);
System.out.println(priceWithCurrency);
String priceAsText = priceWithCurrency.replaceAll( "[$,]", "" );
double priceAsNumber = Double.parseDouble(priceAsText);
System.out.println("Price: " + priceAsNumber);
}

} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}

return null;
}

I have a magnet plate on my phone that was originally just for use in the car. But then I bought a couple of these for home/work and it works pretty well while doing tests/debugging. But I also mostly use wifi debugging. At least for the Pixel you only have to plug in the usb to turn on wifi debugging after a reboot.

If your brother already knows how to program then I would recommend Professional Android 2 Application Development. I like it because it is concise and lets you look up how to do something quickly.

any thoughts(you or anyone reading this) on the book you linked vs this one? besides the stark difference in reviews lol

I think Uncle Bob's PPP Book is the original book from 2002. May be more options by now though.

Yeah, me too.

Check out The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams.

i would go with opengl es 2.0 rather than OpenGL ES 1.1 and for OpenGL ES 2.0 only this book available and it was really helpfull for me so i highly recommend it.

Most of the comments here make me realize I should pull the CLR book down off the shelf and do some homework again.

Grady Booch
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/020189551X/ref=pd_aw_sbs_14_2?ie=UTF8&dpID=51-uo4HUPCL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL100_SR100%2C100_&refRID=110KGH6M22KWAJHKWZ5F

Eric Evans
http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Driven-Design-Tackling--Software/dp/0321125215

Martin Fowler
http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Enterprise-Application-Architecture-Martin/dp/0321127420

• Java the Complete Reference - for your Java needs
  
• Learning Android
  
• Android in Action