This book is a collection of tutorials, walking you through developing Android applications, from the simplest "Hello, world!" to applications using many advanced Android APIs.

Since this book only supplies tutorials, you will want something beyond it as a reference guide. That could be simply the Android SDK documentation, available with your SDK installation or online. It could be the other books in the CommonsWare Android series. Or, it could be another Android book – a list of currently-available Android books can be found on the Android Programming knol. What you do not want to do is attempt to learn all of Android solely from these tutorials, as they will demonstrate the breadth of the Android API but not its depth.

Also, the tutorials themselves have varying depth. Early on, there is more "hand-holding" to explain every bit of what needs to be done (e.g., classes to import). As the tutorials progress, some of the simpler Java bookkeeping steps are left out of the instructions – such as exhaustive lists of import statements – so the tutorials can focus on the Android aspects of the code.