I bought Androids by Chet Haase when it was released a year ago and just finished reading it last week. It is about the creation of the Android operating syste

I bought Androids by Chet Haase when it was released a year ago and just finished reading it last week. It is about the creation of the Android operating system, from its inception until around the time of the release of the Motorola Droid (the first large-selling Android phone) in 2009. The book is 381 pages, and each chapter is fairly discrete. One chapter talks about the graphics team and their work, another chapter talks about the design of the Dalvik Virtual Machine, another talks about the team getting the telephony components working. For a long time I have been picking up and reading a chapter when I have the time, and plane trips are especially good for that. It was written by a graphics engineer who worked on the Android team, so it has some of that insider technical feel to it. Chet writes that he tried to make it accessible to the layperson too. One interesting thing is how Android was formed from the remnants of teams from Danger, Palm/Be, and WebTV/Microsoft, who all had their own ideas on how to do these devices the right way (and what not to do). Also the project was not done slowly and carefully, but was a mad dash to get something out before something like iPhone completely took over the market. Some of the coding specialists they needed probably could not have passed Google's interview bar at the time, so Android was kind of a company within the company, which could bypass Google's interview bar in some cases. I am an Android programmer so the book was especially interesting to me. It started out as a Javascript demo of an operating system for digital cameras in 2003. Android became an operating system that is actively being used by three billion mobile devices by 2022. So it as an interesting story of exponential growth, in the not too distant past.