This is one question I get asked often. Absolutely Yes.

In Pro Android3 the first 3rd of the book is all about learning android with very few prerequisites. As long as you know Java and a little bit of eclipse grab a container of your favorite drinking joe and this weighty book and sit by the pool. This book will take you through the learning process quite effectively.

You may ask what is the "Pro" in the title then? There are four things in the book to justify the "Pro" title. Not being a good book for beginers is clearly not one of them. These three things are

1. Fundamentals are explained

Even for a beginer the basic concepts are covered in great detail with depth and fundamentals. Because of this we have a chapter dedicated each of these fundamental concepts: Resources, Intents, Content Providders, Controls, Menus, Fragments.

2. Android Internals is important even for a beginer

The middle of the books is dedicated to exploring the internal architecture of Android. This section covers threads, processes, long running services in great detail as they play a key role in writing a well behaved application.

3. You can explore advanced APIs if you desire

The third section of the book is truly advanced and covers the various self standing APIs. Even these chapters are organized in such a way that a beginer can pick and choose which APIs he/she would like to learn. we can condently say that even these advanced API chapters are written for a beginer to pick up but also point out the difficult issues with suggested solutions.

4. Stand alone working Samples

The final point of being a "Pro" book helps beginers as well. Almost every chapter has one or more working samples that are worked out in the book itself with all the necessary source code. You can download these examples from the website. Or just glance through them to get a structural idea of a completed application right there in the book.

We have a documented strategy to learn Android

I strongly recommend that you read the document How I have learned Android SDK: Authors note to see how a beginer can use a strategy to learn android. You can use this book to follow the path laid out in that document.

Chapters and concepts that are readable at the pool

we have tried to make the book readable like a book. You don't need a computer in toe to type and see what happens as all the necessary code is there in the book. If you really want to do that we have all the examples as zip files organized by chapter and available for downloads at the flick of a browser.