Thanks to Manning and the Dutch Android User Group, I got the chance to review the book 60 Android Hacks by Carlos Sessa. This book is currently in Manning’s MEAP program, which means that it is not finished or edited, but you can already enjoy some of the chapters as the work progresses, which is great!

Like the title suspects, this book contains 60 useful hacks on various Android topics like layout, animation, views, but also tools and languages. I really like this format because these kinds of books are nice to use as a reference no matter if you are just starting Android development or if you are an experienced Android developer. Each chapter is organised describing a small problem, discussing the solution and then a brief summary of the solution. Awesome.

The word hacks in the title might sound like this book describes wierd cornercase kind of types of situations, but that’s not the case. It’s more like a recipe book which decribes how you can leverage Android mechanisms to create better apps, ranging from chapter 1 (pdf) which describes how to center a view using a LinearLayout’s weights to gems like chapter 17 (adding glowing effects to texts), which describes how to use a custom font and two TextViews to create a cool glowing digital clock.

Only a few chapters are available right now, but if you look at the list of chapters, this sure looks be a promising book with great to-the-point content, so go check it out here.