I just picked up two books on Android development from O’Reilly and have just started reading them.

1. Head First Android Development by Jonathan Simon, and “Early Release” title meaning it isn’t out yet.
2. Learning Android by Marko Gargento

First off I love that O’Reilly ebooks are DRM free, relatively inexpensive and high quality. I decided to start with the Head First book initially and so far it is a really quick read (just under an hour and I’m at about page 150). I think that Learning Android has a bit more meat to it and I look forward to contrasting the two books at some point in the future. For a really quick read and an overview of how to do applications the Head First book is where I would recommend starting, but as an experienced developer I think I will prefer Learning Android. The reason I picked the Head First book is that it is a good, fast read and works well as a visual learning tools since I am often in distracting situations and can’t focus on meaty technical content. The head first series is much more consumable in those situations.

Tonight I’m installing Eclipse, the ADT tools and the Android SDK. Tomorrow I hope to write my first native Android apps for my Sony Arc phone. Perhaps my Tic-Tac-Toe application to start and then something meatier.

The thing I’m still lacking is the time to dedicate to these projects but hopefully having this all on my laptop will let me develop this on my commute to work.