I have not had time to read a lot of books, one (475 page) book I read is "Androids" by Chet Haase. Haase was on the Android team and interviewed most of the p

I have not had time to read a lot of books, one (475 page) book I read is "Androids" by Chet Haase. Haase was on the Android team and interviewed most of the programmers who wrote the initial Android versions. I program Android and find it fascinating. It gives you an idea of how such a successful project from somewhat recent times comes together. Android was originally going to be an operating system for cameras written in Javascript. It covers a big team, and jumps from chapter to chapter on how the Java virtual machine was written, to how the SD card code was written, to how notifications were implemented. Thus it does not have the compelling narrative drive of something like Masters of Doom, which is another good book which follows a much smaller group from id software. But Androids is a very informative book on how something like Android is put together. Also, some books of this type are for the lay person and are breezy and talk about personalities and not much about technical matters. A lay person could probably read this, but it does dive into technical decisions, which I appreciated. For example, I knew Android has a process called zygote which handles the initialization of each Android application, but this book explains why such a process exists, which illuminates things for me beyond me simply knowing that it does exist. Also interesting is how the teams from Danger, Palmsource, and WebTV came in with various ideas of how a device should be built, which all culminated in Android. If you are interested in great prose or a narrative drive, read another book. If you are interested in how the folks from Danger (and Palmsource, and WebTV) had great success at their second swing at bat, in creating a technology that has become ubiquitous worldwide in the past decade with three billion active Android devices - it is an interesting read.