The Busy Coder's Guide to Advanced Android Development Ver 1.9 - Free download Android Tutorial
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Preface
Welcome to the Book!
If you come to this book after having read its companion volume, The Busy
Coder's Guide to Android Development, thanks for sticking with the series!
CommonsWare aims to have the most comprehensive set of Android
development resources (outside of the Open Handset Alliance itself), and
we appreciate your interest.
If you come to this book having learned about Android from other sources,
thanks for joining the CommonsWare community! Android, while aimed at
small devices, is a surprisingly vast platform, making it difficult for any
given book, training, wiki, or other source to completely cover everything
one needs to know. This book will hopefully augment your knowledge of
the ins and outs of Android-dom and make it easier for you to create "killer
apps" that use the Android platform.
And, most of all, thanks for your interest in this book! I sincerely hope you
find it useful and at least occasionally entertaining.
Prerequisites
This book assumes you have experience in Android development, whether
from a CommonsWare resource or someplace else. In other words, you
should have:
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• A working Android development environment, whether it is based
on Eclipse, another IDE, or just the command-line tools that
accompany the Android SDK
• A strong understanding of how to create activities and the various
stock widgets available in Android
• A working knowledge of the Intent system, how it serves as a
message bus, and how to use it to launch other activities
• Experience in creating, or at least using, content providers and
services
If you picked this book up expecting to learn those topics, you really need
another source first, since this book focuses on other topics. While we are
fans of The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development, there are plenty of
other books available covering the Android basics, blog posts, wikis, and, of
course, the main Android site itself. A list of currently-available Android
books can be found on the Android Programming knol.
Some chapters may reference material in previous chapters, though usually
with a link back to the preceding section of relevance. Many chapters will
reference material in The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development,
sometimes via the shorthand BCG to Android moniker.
In order to make effective use of this book, you will want to download the
source code for it off of the book's page on the CommonsWare site.
You can find out when new releases of this book are available via:
• The cw-android Google Group, which is also a great place to ask
questions about the book and its examples
• The commonsguy Twitter feed
• The CommonsBlog
• The Warescription newsletter, which you can subscribe to off of
your Warescription page
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Warescription
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But, there are probably even more problems. If you find one, please let us
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Questions about the bug bounty, or problems you wish to report for bounty
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Source Code
The source code samples shown in this book are available for download
from the book's GitHub repository. All of the Android projects are licensed
under the Apache 2.0 License, in case you have the desire to reuse any of it.
If you wish to use the source code from the CommonsWare Web site, bear
in mind a few things:
1. The projects are set up to be built by Ant, not by Eclipse. If you wish
to use the code with Eclipse, you will need to create a suitable
Android Eclipse project and import the code and other assets.
2. You should delete build.xml, then run android update project
-p ... (where ... is the path to a project of interest) on those
projects you wish to use, so the build files are updated for your
Android SDK version.
The book sometimes shows entire source files, and occasionally shows only
fragments of source files that are relevant to the current discussion. The
book rarely shows each and every file for the sample projects. Please refer
to the source code repository for the full source to any of the book samples.
Some samples will be from other Android projects, such as the
CommonsWare Android Components. Those chapters will include links to
their respective source code repositories.
Creative Commons and the Four-to-Free
(42F) Guarantee
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four years have elapsed (perhaps sooner!), you can use this prose for noncommercial
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