Given below are top 20 picks for books on Android Development . The list includes books for every level from beginner to advanced.

Here you’ll find the best learning resources for Android app development from start to finish. No matter what you want to create I guarantee there’s something here for everyone.

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1.Android Studio 3.0 Development Essentials - Android 8 Edition

Author: Neil Smyth

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (September 25, 2017)

Fully updated for Android Studio 3.0 and Android 8, the goal of this book is to teach the skills necessary to develop Android based applications using the Android Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the Android 8 Software Development Kit (SDK) and the Java programming language.

Beginning with the basics, this book provides an outline of the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment. An overview of Android Studio is included covering areas such as tool windows, the code editor and the Layout Editor tool. An introduction to the architecture of Android is followed by an in-depth look at the design of Android applications and user interfaces using the Android Studio environment. More advanced topics such as database management, content providers and intents are also covered, as are touch screen handling, gesture recognition, camera access and the playback and recording of both video and audio. This edition of the book also covers printing, transitions and cloud-based file storage.

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2.Head First Android Development: A Brain-Friendly Guide

Author: Dawn Griffiths (Author), David Griffiths (Author)

Publisher: O’Reilly Media; 2 edition (August 19, 2017)

If you have an idea for a killer Android app, this fully revised and updated edition will help you build your first working application in a jiffy. You’ll learn hands-on how to structure your app, design flexible and interactive interfaces, run services in the background, make your app work on various smartphones and tablets, and much more. It’s like having an experienced Android developer sitting right next to you! All you need to get started is some Java know-how.

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3.Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (3rd Edition) (Big Nerd Ranch Guides)

Author: Bill Phillips (Author), Chris Stewart (Author), Kristin Marsicano (Author)

Publisher: Big Nerd Ranch Guides; 3 edition (February 9, 2017)

Based on Big Nerd Ranch’s popular Android bootcamps, this guide will lead you through the wilderness using hands-on example apps combined with clear explanations of key concepts and APIs. This book focuses on practical techniques for developing apps compatible with Android 4.4 (KitKat) through Android 7.0 (Nougat) and beyond.

Write and run code every step of the way, using Android Studio to create apps that integrate with other apps, download and display pictures from the web, play sounds, and more. Each chapter and app has been designed and tested to provide the knowledge and experience you need to get started in Android development.

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4.Android Application Development All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Author: Barry Burd

Publisher: For Dummies; 2 edition (August 3, 2015)

If you’re an aspiring or beginning programmer interested in creating apps for the Android market―which grows in size and downloads every day―this is your comprehensive, one-stop guide. Android Application Development All-in-One For Dummies covers the information you absolutely need to get started developing apps for Android. Inside, you’ll quickly get up to speed on Android programming concepts and put your new knowledge to use to manage data, program cool phone features, refine your applications, navigate confidently around the Android native development kit, and add important finishing touches to your apps.

Covering the latest features and enhancements to the Android Software Developer’s Kit, this friendly, hands-on guide walks you through Android programming basics, shares techniques for developing great Android applications, reviews Android hardware, and much more.

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5.Android Development for Gifted Primates: A Beginner’s Guide (Guides for Gifted Primates)

Author: Antonis Tsagaris

Publisher: Independently published (August 14, 2018)

Whether you consider yourself a gifted primate or not, Antonis Tsagaris’s Android Development for Gifted Primates is an interesting option. Often using strong language and unafraid to express an opinion, the author suggests his guide as an alternative to “dry, humorless, life-sucking coding books […] written by an automaton.”

Aimed at beginners, this comparatively-short and inexpensive book requires only a basic level of experience with Java or similar programming language to get started. Available in printed or ebook form, it takes the reader through Android development from the absolute basics to finishing your first application.

Along the way, you’ll learn how to set up the Android Studio development environment, create an interactive user interface with XML, get different Android components to communicate with each other, and plenty more.

If you’re easily offended, you may want to look at one of the other Android development guides — but if not, this is an entertaining and useful place to start.

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6.Android Cookbook: Problems and Solutions for Android Developers

Author: Ian F. Darwin

Publisher: O’Reilly Media; 2 edition (June 3, 2017)

Jump in and build working Android apps with the help of more than 230 tested recipes. The second edition of this acclaimed cookbook includes recipes for working with user interfaces, multitouch gestures, location awareness, web services, and specific device features such as the phone, camera, and accelerometer. You also get useful info on packaging your app for the Google Play Market.

Ideal for developers familiar with Java, Android basics, and the Java SE API, this book features recipes contributed by more than three dozen Android developers. Each recipe provides a clear solution and sample code you can use in your project right away. Among numerous topics, this cookbook helps you:

Get started with the tooling you need for developing and testing Android apps Create layouts with Android’s UI controls, graphical services, and pop-up mechanisms Build location-aware services on Google Maps and OpenStreetMap Control aspects of Android’s music, video, and other multimedia capabilities Work with accelerometers and other Android sensors Use various gaming and animation frameworks Store and retrieve persistent data in files and embedded databases Access RESTful web services with JSON and other formats Test and troubleshoot individual components and your entire application

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7.Android 9 Development Cookbook: Over 100 recipes and solutions to solve the most common problems faced by Android developers, 3rd Edition

Author: Rick Boyer

Publisher: Packt Publishing (October 19, 2018)

The Android OS has the largest installation base of any operating system in the world. There has never been a better time to learn Android development to write your own applications, or to make your own contributions to the open source community! With this extensively updated cookbook, you’ll find solutions for working with the user interfaces, multitouch gestures, location awareness, web services, and device features such as the phone, camera, and accelerometer. You also get useful steps on packaging your app for the Android Market. Each recipe provides a clear solution and sample code you can use in your project from the outset. Whether you are writing your first app or your hundredth, this is a book that you will come back to time and time again, with its many tips and tricks on the rich features of Android Pie.

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8.Kotlin Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Author: Josh Skeen (Author), David Greenhalgh (Author)

Publisher: Big Nerd Ranch Guides; 1 edition (July 5, 2018)

Based on Big Nerd Ranch’s popular Kotlin Essentials course, this guide shows you how to work effectively with the Kotlin programming language through hands-on examples and clear explanations of key Kotlin concepts and foundational APIs. Written for Kotlin 1.2, this book will also introduce you to JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA development environment.

Whether you are an experienced Android developer looking for modern features beyond what Java offers or a new developer ready to learn your first programming language, the authors will guide you from first principles to advanced usage of Kotlin. By the end of this book, you will be empowered to create reliable, concise applications in Kotlin.

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9.Kotlin in Action

Author: Dmitry Jemerov (Author), Svetlana Isakova (Author)

Publisher: Manning Publications; 1st edition (February 19, 2017)

Kotlin in Action teaches you to use the Kotlin language for production-quality applications. Written for experienced Java developers, this example-rich book goes further than most language books, covering interesting topics like building DSLs with natural language syntax. The authors are core Kotlin developers, so you can trust that even the gnarly details are dead accurate.

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10.Head First Kotlin: A Brain-Friendly Guide

Author: Dawn Griffiths (Author), David Griffiths (Author)

Publisher: O’Reilly Media; 1 edition (March 4, 2019)

Head First Kotlin is a complete introduction to coding in Kotlin. This hands-on book helps you learn the Kotlin language with a unique method that goes beyond syntax and how-to manuals and teaches you how to think like a great Kotlin developer. You’ll learn everything from language fundamentals to collections, generics, lambdas, and higher-order functions. Along the way, you’ll get to play with both object-oriented and functional programming. If you want to really understand Kotlin, this is the book for you.

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11.Practical Android: 14 Complete Projects on Advanced Techniques and Approaches

Author: Mark Wickham

Publisher: Apress; 1st ed. edition (January 4, 2018)

The book is an ideal resource for developers who have some development experience, but may not be Android or mobile development experts. Each chapter includes at least one complete project to show the reader how to implement the concepts.

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12.Professional Android

Author: Reto Meier (Author), Ian Lake (Author)

Publisher: Wrox; 4 edition (September 25, 2018)

Professional Android, 4th Edition shows developers how to leverage the latest features of Android to create robust and compelling mobile apps. This hands-on approach provides in-depth coverage through a series of projects, each introducing a new Android platform feature and highlighting the techniques and best practices that exploit its utmost functionality. The exercises begin simply, and gradually build into advanced Android development. Clear, concise examples show you how to quickly construct real-world mobile applications.

This book is your guide to smart, efficient, effective Android development.

Learn the best practices that get more out of Android Understand the anatomy, lifecycle, and UI metaphor of Android apps Design for all mobile platforms, including tablets Utilize both the Android framework and Google Play services

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13.The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development by Mark L. Murphy (2009-02-06)

Publisher: CommonsWare, LLC (1750)

Like anything else in the technology world, Android development moves quickly, and printed books eventually become out of date. Mark Murphy’s Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development gets around this problem via a subscription-based ebook model. Buyers get the latest version of the book, plus six months of updates, with new versions coming out every couple of months.

Coming in at a mammoth 200+ chapters, 4,000+ pages, hundreds of sample apps, plus visual presentations on Android app development topics, no stone is left unturned. The book’s core chapters cover the basics of setting up a development environment, user interfaces, data management, and much more, before branching off into “trails” that cover dozens of advanced topics designed to be read as-needed.

As well as the book itself, buyers can ask questions of the author during “office hours” chats each week. If you don’t need a physical book to read, The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development is the most comprehensive and up-to-date resource available.

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14.Android Apprentice (Second Edition): Beginning Android Development with Kotlin

Author: raywenderlich Tutorial Team (Author), Namrata Bandekar (Author), Darryl Bayliss (Author), Tom Blankenship (Author), Fuad Kamal (Author)

Publisher: Razeware LLC (May 14, 2019)

Learning Android programming can be challenging. Sure, there is plenty of documentation, but the tools and libraries available today for Android are easily overwhelming for newcomers to Android and Kotlin.

Android Apprentice takes a different approach. From building a simple first app, all the way to a fully featured podcast player app, this book walks you step-by-step, building on basic concepts to advanced techniques so you can build amazing apps worthy of the Google Play Store!

Who This Book Is For

This book is for anyone interested in writing mobile apps for Android. Though no previous mobile experience is necessary, this book is also a great resource for iPhone developers transitioning from iOS.

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15.Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners: Build Android apps starting from zero programming experience with the new Kotlin programming language

Author: John Horton

Publisher: Packt Publishing (April 30, 2019)

Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world and Kotlin has been declared by Google as a first-class programming language to build Android apps. With the imminent arrival of the most anticipated Android update, Android 10 (Q), this book gets you started building apps compatible with the latest version of Android.

It adopts a project-style approach, where we focus on teaching the fundamentals of Android app development and the essentials of Kotlin by building three real-world apps and more than a dozen mini-apps. The book begins by giving you a strong grasp of how Kotlin and Android work together before gradually moving onto exploring the various Android APIs for building stunning apps for Android with ease. You will learn to make your apps more presentable using different layouts. You will dive deep into Kotlin programming concepts such as variables, functions, data structures, Object-Oriented code, and how to connect your Kotlin code to the UI. You will learn to add multilingual text so that your app is accessible to millions of more potential users. You will learn how animation, graphics, and sound effects work and are implemented in your Android app.

By the end of the book, you will have sound knowledge about significant Kotlin programming concepts and start building your own fully featured Android apps.

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16.Kotlin for Android Developers: Learn Kotlin the easy way while developing an Android App

Author: Antonio Leiva

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (March 21, 2016)

Google has officially announced Kotlin as a supported language to write Android Apps.These are amazing news for Android developers, which now have the ability to use a modern and powerful language to make their job easier and funnier.But this comes with other responsibilities. If you want to be a good candidate for new Android opportunities, Kotlin is becoming a new need most companies will ask for. So it’s your time to start learning about it!And “Kotlin for Android Developers” is the best tool. Recommended by both Google and Jetbrains, this book will guide through the process of learning all the new features that Java was missing, in an easy and fun way.You’ll be creating an Android app from ground using Kotlin as the main language. The idea is to learn the language by example, instead of following a typical structure. I’ll be stopping to explain the most interesting concepts and ideas about Kotlin, comparing it with Java 7. This way, you can see what the differences are and which parts of the language will help you speed up your work.This book is not meant to be a language reference, but a tool for Android developers to learn Kotlin and be able to continue with their own projects by themselves. I’ll be solving many of the typical problems we have to face in our daily lives by making use of the language expressiveness and some other really interesting tools and libraries.The book is very practical, so it is recommended to follow the examples and the code in front of a computer and try everything it’s suggested. You could, however, take a first read to get a broad idea and then dive into practice.

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17.Kotlin for Android App Development (Developer’s Library)

Author: Peter Sommerhoff

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (January 3, 2019)

“Peter Sommerhoff takes a practical approach to teaching Kotlin by providing a larger set of code listings that demonstrate language features and by guiding readers through the development of two Android apps step by step. . . . Peter finds a good balance between what is essential and what can be left to readers, so this book is an efficient yet comprehensible source for starting programming with Kotlin.”

–Bernhard Rumpe, Professor of Software Engineering, RWTH Aachen University

The Kotlin language brings state-of-the-art programming techniques and constructs to Android development. Kotlin for Android App Development will help you rapidly understand Kotlin’s principles and techniques, apply Kotlin in production app development, integrate Kotlin with existing Java code, and plan a migration to Kotlin, if you choose.

If you have at least basic programming experience (with any language), Peter Sommerhoff’s well-crafted overview and examples will help you get quickly up-to-speed with the Kotlin language, its constructs, and its advanced functional and object-oriented capabilities.

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18.Android Studio IDE Quick Reference: A Pocket Guide to Android Studio Development

Author: Ted Hagos

Publisher: Apress; 1st ed. edition (July 31, 2019)

This concise reference book for Android Studio 3 presents the essential Android Studio functions in a well-organized format that can be used as a handy reference. It will quickly demonstrate the usage of the Android Studio IDE to build an Android mobile app step by step.

You won’t find any technical jargon, bloated samples, drawn out history lessons, or witty stories in this book. What you will find is a reference that is concise, to the point and highly accessible. The Android Studio IDE Quick Reference is packed with useful information and is a must-have for any mobile or Android app developer or programmer.

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19.Poetry in Programming: Building Applications with the Android SDK

Author: Leonard Tatum (Author), Elliott Baygan (Author)

Publisher: Independently published (July 14, 2019)

The key to this book is that it is a concoction of both basic and complex topics. The expression of ideas and distinctive style and rhythm of the authors is much like poetry for programming. This book does not focus on linear progression, as learning Android development does not generally begin linearly. This book, as well as our subsequent books, aim to simulate this erratic and broad learning pattern. It is also our goal to place special emphasis on the learning-by-doing approach. Each chapter will provide a fully functional application whose source code can be downloaded and examined for free! We not only tell you about programming concepts, we show them.About the AuthorsLeonard Tatum (Software Developer) has over a decade of programming and software development experience, with several additional years of developing mobile applications. He is also CEO and Founder of the startup indie gaming company, Tatum Games, LLC. Tatum Games is a developer and publisher of mobile games focusing on developing gaming products in collaboration with their fanbase and communities. This unique approach allows users to make a direct impact in their gaming products and demonstrates that Tatum Games really cares about their customer needs. Elliott Baygan (Software Developer) has over half a decade of software development experience, and four years of native Android experience. He started working with Android in 2014 while working at Baytek Software Development Corporation. He graduated in 2016 with a B.S. in Physics. He is currently working on a suite of apps for car mechanics.

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20.Programming Kotlin: Create Elegant, Expressive, and Performant JVM and Android Applications

Author: Venkat Subramaniam

Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf; 1 edition (October 1, 2019)

Programmers don’t just use Kotlin, they love it. Even Google has adopted it as a first-class language for Android development. With Kotlin, you can intermix imperative, functional, and object-oriented styles of programming and benefit from the approach that’s most suitable for the problem at hand. Learn to use the many features of this highly concise, fluent, elegant, and expressive statically typed language with easy-to-understand examples. Learn to write easy-to-maintain, high-performing JVM and Android applications, create DSLs, program asynchrony, and much more.

Kotlin is a highly concise, elegant, fluent, and expressive statically typed multi-paradigm language. It is one of the few languages that compiles down to both Java bytecode and JavaScript. You can use it to build server-side, front-end, and Android applications. With Kotlin, you need less code to accomplish your tasks, while keeping the code type-safe and less prone to error. If you want to learn the essentials of Kotlin, from the fundamentals to more advanced concepts, you’ve picked the right book.