I’m usually a huge fan of the Head First series of books. They are, in general, written in a way that is geared towards efficient learning. I almost always take great joy in some of their puzzles and subtle humor. This book, was no exception up to the chapter on mobile development with Python.

At some point in this chapter nothing seemed to work. I ended up doing a lot of research trying to understand how to do now what the book was instructing me how to do then. The problem was essentially that the Android API for Python had been updated and changed fairly substantially it seems since the book was written. While this is natural for APIs and programs in general it can really ruin the teaching / learning experience for someone really new to the topic.

The resulting issue was that each of the following chapters (which I believe was three) were very difficult to follow since they were building on the mobile app development chapter that had fallen to pieces.

In the end I learned a lot about Python outside of the Android API, but there may be better general python references out there to check out.