Manning Publications Kotlin in Action, Second Edition

ab

Good book

I came to this book with 20+ years software engineering experience, most recently heavy on Python and asyncio. I had to implement an Android app which makes judicious use of coroutines, and I first heard of one of the authors, Roman Elizarov from a few of his youtube videos on coroutines in Kotlin. The videos are an excellent explanation of how they work and the design choices and theory that went into them. This book is equally good. What I particularly like are the examples - they not only show you the right way to do things, but give several counter-examples of the less-than-right way, and explain the shortcomings. Explanations are just right - they pack in all the right information to explain each concept, but with nothing unnecessary.

Love this book, really recommended read for anyone using kotlin for android development. I also have the previous edition (not much has changed).

The part 3 on concurrent programming with coroutines and flows alone make it worth paying for this book. Absolutely clear explanations teaching from absolute ground up. However they have not included chapters on channels, not sure why. Even if they decided not to include, they must at least have mentioned such a thing exists being an authoritative book on the language. Some of the previous chapters could have been much clearer I.e., chapter on Generics. Due to all these drawbacks I wanted to take a star away. But chapter 14 earns it all, hence retaining the 5 stars.