Mark Lawrence Murphy - The Busy Coders Guide to Advanced Android Development, Version 1.9.2

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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.

This book assumes you have experience in Android development, whether from a CommonsWare resource or someplace else. In other words, you should have:

1. A working Android development environment, whether it is based on Eclipse, another IDE, or just the command-line tools that accompany the Android SDK
2. A strong understanding of how to create activities and the various stock widgets available in Android
3. A working knowledge of the Intent system, how it serves as a message bus, and how to use it to launch other activities
4. 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.

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