February 11, 2015 at 13:00Bridging the gap, learning Android
This will not be about knowledge gaps, but more on that later.
As an old habit, I still read paper programming books. In particular, about the development for Android. A few years ago, with great literature on this topic, there was great tension in the great and mighty. Now the situation has improved a bit. I bought and read, probably 99% of all published books. There are two problems with books. The first - they are of the same type in their mass and talk about the same thing. The second problem is a significant delay in the publication. As a rule, the delay occurs in versions 1-2, which is quite critical. For example, when versions of Android 3.0 and 4.0 appeared with fragments, reading examples of creating applications for Android 2.3 was stupid.
Back in 2011, an Android book was released in 24 hours, which, in my opinion, was one of the best. I liked the approach to disclosing the topic - one cross-cutting project was taken and gradually became more complicated from hour to hour. Along the way, fundamental things were explained on one project. It was clear where and when to apply these or other features.
Last week, I accidentally stumbled on the Internet to a message that a new publication with a longer name, Creating Android Applications in 24 hours with the same authors, was released. And immediatelyI bought it.
When buying, I was a little embarrassed that the inscription 3rd edition flaunted on the cover . Apparently, the countdown comes from foreign publications. Okay, let's not quibble.
This time, the authors abandoned the previous approach and began to write like everyone else. One hour, one topic, one project. Then all over again. In the middle of the book, they temporarily returned to the old way, when for 4 lessons they explained new topics using the example of one project.
I started to read. Already by the fortieth page two typos had met:
Gone are the days when you could have put a party card on the table for something like that. I talked with people who in the Soviet era worked in publishing and I know firsthand about this. Now you won’t surprise anyone with typos, and in computer literature they have been encountered all the time.
But then my amazement grew more and more.
I saw a sentence written without a single space. I immediately remembered school German, where long words were not uncommon:
If you think that it was an accident, then you have another example:
In fact, the absence of spaces is found constantly. As if, someone decided to save on paper and save the forest. Sometimes, a sentence lacks one space, sometimes two. Sometimes they do not exist as a class.
Leave the gaps alone for now. Let's turn to the code. By the way, I did not like the font for the code, some narrow and not too readable. But I'm not a type designer, maybe I don’t understand something.
We look at the following code:
How do you like it? Two variables with the same name are almost nearby. And the principle of naming from one character? What is a sin to hide, I myself wrote about the same style for myself about fifteen years ago in Visual Basic. Now this approach is justified, probably only in js-libraries to reduce the size.
Then the authors corrected themselves and began to give the buttons more meaningful names. But radish horseradish is not sweeter.
In my opinion, in all modern languages there is an unwritten rule to use verbs for function methods.
But only in this case.
Formatting code without indentation (struggle with spaces, you remember):
Okay, indentation. So removed the gap between the class name and the variable.
An accident? I don’t think so.
Error-free code is fantastic. A programmer should not blindly copy text.
Again, "a good name for the button."
Text design.
Methods in Java are capitalized. Well, this is such a trifle. But when formatting Word replaced them with large ones, Word cannot be mistaken (one of the versions why this happened).
But sometimes you can make an exception and leave one item with a small one. Indeed, why am I picking on.
Tables are decorated with love, spaces will not pass!
If we steal gaps slowly, then let's dump single quotes to the reader.
Surprisingly, on the pages of the book are excerpts from the code, and where to see the full source code is not written anywhere. I did not find any mention in the book. On the website of the Russian publishing house, too. I had to look for a website of a foreign publishing house, and only there I found a link to the archive.
On the pages of the book there was a remark that this work was written in June 2013. Remember, I talked about the backlog at the beginning of the article. This means that here you will not find materials about Material (pun intended), as well as references to Android Studio. Many novice developers perceive Eclipse and Android Studio as different and incompatible programming languages (!). More than once I met similar statements in forums where people refused to study an example if the word Eclipse was found there, with the statement: "After all, everything is different there and I won’t work for it."
The book left me with a double impression. On the one hand, it covers interesting topics using the API for Flickr and Facebook.
On the other hand, all these seals and white space are all given to me.
Happy programming!
As an old habit, I still read paper programming books. In particular, about the development for Android. A few years ago, with great literature on this topic, there was great tension in the great and mighty. Now the situation has improved a bit. I bought and read, probably 99% of all published books. There are two problems with books. The first - they are of the same type in their mass and talk about the same thing. The second problem is a significant delay in the publication. As a rule, the delay occurs in versions 1-2, which is quite critical. For example, when versions of Android 3.0 and 4.0 appeared with fragments, reading examples of creating applications for Android 2.3 was stupid.
Back in 2011, an Android book was released in 24 hours, which, in my opinion, was one of the best. I liked the approach to disclosing the topic - one cross-cutting project was taken and gradually became more complicated from hour to hour. Along the way, fundamental things were explained on one project. It was clear where and when to apply these or other features.
Last week, I accidentally stumbled on the Internet to a message that a new publication with a longer name, Creating Android Applications in 24 hours with the same authors, was released. And immediately
When buying, I was a little embarrassed that the inscription 3rd edition flaunted on the cover . Apparently, the countdown comes from foreign publications. Okay, let's not quibble.
This time, the authors abandoned the previous approach and began to write like everyone else. One hour, one topic, one project. Then all over again. In the middle of the book, they temporarily returned to the old way, when for 4 lessons they explained new topics using the example of one project.
I started to read. Already by the fortieth page two typos had met:
Gone are the days when you could have put a party card on the table for something like that. I talked with people who in the Soviet era worked in publishing and I know firsthand about this. Now you won’t surprise anyone with typos, and in computer literature they have been encountered all the time.
But then my amazement grew more and more.
I saw a sentence written without a single space. I immediately remembered school German, where long words were not uncommon:
If you think that it was an accident, then you have another example:
In fact, the absence of spaces is found constantly. As if, someone decided to save on paper and save the forest. Sometimes, a sentence lacks one space, sometimes two. Sometimes they do not exist as a class.
Leave the gaps alone for now. Let's turn to the code. By the way, I did not like the font for the code, some narrow and not too readable. But I'm not a type designer, maybe I don’t understand something.
We look at the following code:
How do you like it? Two variables with the same name are almost nearby. And the principle of naming from one character? What is a sin to hide, I myself wrote about the same style for myself about fifteen years ago in Visual Basic. Now this approach is justified, probably only in js-libraries to reduce the size.
Then the authors corrected themselves and began to give the buttons more meaningful names. But radish horseradish is not sweeter.
In my opinion, in all modern languages there is an unwritten rule to use verbs for function methods.
But only in this case.
Formatting code without indentation (struggle with spaces, you remember):
Okay, indentation. So removed the gap between the class name and the variable.
An accident? I don’t think so.
Error-free code is fantastic. A programmer should not blindly copy text.
Again, "a good name for the button."
Text design.
Methods in Java are capitalized. Well, this is such a trifle. But when formatting Word replaced them with large ones, Word cannot be mistaken (one of the versions why this happened).
But sometimes you can make an exception and leave one item with a small one. Indeed, why am I picking on.
Tables are decorated with love, spaces will not pass!
If we steal gaps slowly, then let's dump single quotes to the reader.
Surprisingly, on the pages of the book are excerpts from the code, and where to see the full source code is not written anywhere. I did not find any mention in the book. On the website of the Russian publishing house, too. I had to look for a website of a foreign publishing house, and only there I found a link to the archive.
On the pages of the book there was a remark that this work was written in June 2013. Remember, I talked about the backlog at the beginning of the article. This means that here you will not find materials about Material (pun intended), as well as references to Android Studio. Many novice developers perceive Eclipse and Android Studio as different and incompatible programming languages (!). More than once I met similar statements in forums where people refused to study an example if the word Eclipse was found there, with the statement: "After all, everything is different there and I won’t work for it."
The book left me with a double impression. On the one hand, it covers interesting topics using the API for Flickr and Facebook.
On the other hand, all these seals and white space are all given to me.
Happy programming!