An example of the poor editing in O’Reilly’s “Programming Android”

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OK, I don’t really want to sound like I am bashing this book – Programming Android: Java Programming for the New Generation of Mobile Devices – because, by its very nature, writing a technical book must be highly demanding in terms of accuracy and I see no signs of any mistakes – just what I think is poor editing. See if you agree…

So, the book is discussing how to serialize classes using Android’s Parcelable interface, and makes this, correct point about serializing an enum type:

“Be sure, though, to think about future changes to data when picking the serialized representation. Certainly it would have been much easier in this example to represent state as an int whose value was obtained by calling state.ordinal. Doing so, however, would make it much harder to maintain forward compatibility for the object. Suppose it becomes necessary at some point to add a new state … this trivial change makes new versions of the object completely incompatible with earlier versions.”

But then discussing de-serialization, the book states, without comment:

“The idiomatic way to do this is to read each piece of state from the Parcel in the exact same order it was written in writeToParcel (again, this is important), and then to call a constructor with the unmarshaled [sic] state.”

Now, technically, these passages are not in disagreement – but it is clearly the case that the de/serialization process is highly coupled with the data design – something that ought to be pointed out, especially if we are going to make a big deal of it on the serialization phase.

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