Total application revenue from the Google Play Store was $3.3B in Q4 2016, an 82 percent increase with respect to 2015 [1]. Moreover, 90 percent of that revenue is from game applications [2]. Thus, there is clearly a market for game programmers and for authors who write books about game programming.

Android Studio game development, a self-described mini-book of 95 pages (excluding the front matter), is a recent arrival to the scene. The first 37 pages are dedicated to the tools of the trade: Android Studio for code developing and GitHub for version control. But then the chapter “Intro to Game Development,” the core subject of the title, is only three pages long! The rest of the mini-book is dedicated to developing an application--I would not dare to call it a game--of a starship traveling across a starred background using the OpenGL ES graphics library. The book teaches how to load images, and very briefly how to respond to user input and the basics of collision detection.

As a final assessment, this mini-book can only be recommended to programmers with some previous experience in game development, maybe not in Android, and who know nothing about OpenGL ES.

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