HIGHLIGHT
KEY SELLING POINTS
Non-technical readers will learn how to build mobile apps quickly -- without formal instruction or years of training
Helps readers turn their great ideas into full-functioning apps
Teaches how to create texting apps, location-aware apps, apps for storing data on the Web, and more
Shows how to use App Inventor's GPS-location sensor, and how to take advantage of an Android device's phone features
Teaches them how to build apps that communicate with the Web, including apps that talk to sites such as Amazon and Twitter
AUDIENCE
Beginner to Intermediate Android Developers Hobbyists/Makers College and K-12 students
ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY
App Inventor is poised to change the mobile development landscape significantly. Not only does it make it much, much easier for beginners to get their hands dirty and start developing with little overhead or formal schooling/training, it stands to turn merely curious parties into more serious developers as well. The whole enterprise carries a strong stance that "programming can be a vehicle for engaging powerful ideas through active learning," which is just so in line with O'Reilly. The blocks editor uses the Open Blocks Java library for creating visual blocks programming languages. Open Blocks is distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Scheller Teacher Education Program. The compiler that translates the visual blocks language for implementation on Android uses the Kawa Language Framework and Kawa's dialect of the Scheme programming language, developed by Per Bothner and distributed as part of the Gnu Operating System by the Free Software Foundation.
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COMPETING TITLES
None, we'd definitely be first to market with this one.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
David Wolber is the Chair of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco, and teaches App Inventor in a course at USF. He worked with the App Inventor team, and authored the advanced tutorials found on the App Inventor site. The apps created by his students– mostly humanities and business majors with no prior programming experience– have been chronicled in articles of The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Tech Crunch, Fortune.CNN.com, and Yahoo News.
Harold (Hal) Abelson, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, has a longstanding interest in using computation as a conceptual framework in teaching. He has played a key role in fostering MIT institutional educational technology initiativeI, and is a founding director of Creative Commons and Public Knowledge. Hal’s book, Turtle Geometry, written with Andrea diSessa in 1981, presented a computational approach to geometry that has been cited as "the first step in a revolutionary change in the entire teaching/learning process."
Ellen Spertus is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Mills College, where she has taught with App Inventor, and a Senior Research Scientist at Google, where she was one of the App Inventor developers. She and her work have been written about in Wired,
USA Today (which described her as "a geek with principles"), and in The New York Times (as one of three "women who might change the face of the computer industry"). In addition to her many technical publications, her writings have appeared in the book She's Such a Geek: Women Write about Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff and in the magazines Technology Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Odyssey: Adventures in Science, and Glamour.
Liz Looney is a senior software engineer at Google, where she helped develop App Inventor and is a member of the Robotics Task Force. She has over 20 years of experience in creating programming tools and holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from The University of New Hampshire.
May 2011
$39.99
£30.99
€32.00
Binding: Softcover
384 pages
Trim Size: 7 x 9.1875
Carton qty: 22
ISBN13: 9781449397487
ISBN10: 1449397484
Shelving: Mobile/Wireless
Additional Media: none
Will Sell Like:
Getting Started with Arduino
(9780596155513) Getting
Started with Processing
(9781449379803)
9781449397487
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449397487/sellsheet_uk<08/06/2011 08:35:16>
