Putting projects from books on resume

Question

I've been reading a book called "Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide". In this book, you create projects under the guidance of the author such as:

GeoQuiz: In your first app, you will explore the fundamentals of Android projects,activities, layouts, and explicit intents.

CriminalIntent The largest app in the book, CriminalIntent lets you keep a record of your colleagues’ lapses around the office. You will learn to use fragments, master-detail interfaces, list-backed interfaces, menus, the camera, implicit intents,and more.

BeatBox: Intimidate your foes with this app while you learn more about fragments, media playback, MVVM architecture, data binding, testing, themes, and drawables.

And more.

According to this thread, the general consensus is that you should not put books in your resume, rather put projects that showcase your experience.

However, would it be a good idea to put list projects such as those showcased above that one has made under the guidance of a book on one's resume?

Answer 1

No, these projects do not show your ability to take on a professional role.

The key thing projects try to demonstrate, in lieu of employement experience, is that you have experience of working on real-life problems and dealing with issues that arise during regular development.

Working from a book means you haven't:

• Had to develop a solution from requirements, the solution was given to you.

• Had to work in an unknown problem space, the book told you it would work ahead of time.

• Had to solve unexpected issues that came from assumptions you made in the design. The book gives you an architecture, you knew it would work.

• Had to experience and made decisions through the entire development cycle, from design to release. You made no real decisions with the book-projects.

• Had to verify your solution works, against your own metrics. You knew the expected output from the book, and were able to check if your solution matched.

It may possibly show you have a basic grasp of that language's syntax (although it's likely the book will give you enough of that, so I wouldn't count on this).

But the real thing a project shows isn't your grasp of a language, but your ability to create a solution to a problem from scratch and implement a successful solution. These book-projects, do not demonstrate this.

I should add, that including these projects in amongst other "real" projects would still be a bad idea. The inclusion of these suggests you don't have experience, but also don't understand enough of development to know that you're even lacking that experience.

Answer 2

No.

Showing own projects on a resume has a single reason: Increasing the chance to get a job.

Usually because an employer can see there if your code is good and clean, what libs you're familiar with, how you design your programs architecture, how you use CVS, etc.etc. - in short anything that gives them a (positive) image of how you work.
Other than that, for some it's already positive if there are (non-commercial) projects, meaning the person doesn't do programming only for money, but because he/she likes it.
And if some of your projects are somewhat known, and used by other people, it's of course great too.

Listing such a book project (where you have book specifically guiding you through it, as well as the downloadable full solution, and the whole purpose often is plain silly ("Intimidate your foes" lol)) instead shows that you are not able to make bigger and more complicated things, that you have no serious projects that might be useful for at least one person, that you're a bit desperate to get a job, that you don't understand something about what employers want from you, etc.

In short, all bad, so just don't do it.