Mark L Murphy - Android Programming Tutorials, 3rd Edition

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If you come to this book after having read its companion volumes, The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development and The Busy Coder's Guide to Advanced 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!

This book is a collection of tutorials, walking you through developing Android applications, from the simplest "Hello, world!" to applications using many advanced Android APIs.

Since this book only supplies tutorials, you will want something beyond it as a reference guide. That could be simply the Android SDK documentation, available with your SDK installation or online. It could be the other books in the CommonsWare Android series. Or, it could be another Android book a list of currently-available Android books can be found on the Android Programming knol. What you do not want to do is attempt to learn all of Android solely from these tutorials, as they will demonstrate the breadth of the Android API but not its depth.

Also, the tutorials themselves have varying depth. Early on, there is more "hand-holding" to explain every bit of what needs to be done (e.g., classes to import). As the tutorials progress, some of the simpler Java bookkeeping steps are left out of the instructions such as exhaustive lists of import statements so the tutorials can focus on the Android aspects of the code.

You can find out when new releases of this book are available via:

1. The cw-android Google Group, which is also a great place to ask questions about the book and its examples
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3. The CommonsBlog
4. The Warescription newsletter, which you can subscribe to off of your Warescription page

Each tutorial has a main set of step-by-step instructions, plus an "Extra Credit" section. The step-by-step instructions are intended to guide you through creating or extending Android applications, including all code you need to enter and all commands you need to run. The "Extra Credit" sections, on the other hand, provide some suggested areas for experimentation beyond the base tutorial, without step-by-step instructions.

If you wish to start somewhere in the middle of the book, or if you only wish to do the "Extra Credit" work, or if you just want to examine the results without doing the tutorials directly yourself, you can download the results of each tutorial's step-by-step instructions from the book's github repository. You can either clone the repository, or click the Download Source button in the upper-right to get the source as a ZIP file. The source code is organized by tutorial number, so you can readily find the project(s) associated with a particular tutorial from the book.

Note that while you are welcome to copy and paste code out of the book, you may wish to copy from the full source code instead. A side-effect of the way the source code listings are put into this book makes them difficult to copy from some PDF viewers, for example.

The tutorials do not assume you are using Eclipse, let alone any other specific editor or debugger. The instructions included in the tutorials will speak in general terms when it comes to tools outside of those supplied by the Android SDK itself.

The code for the tutorials has been tested most recently on Android 2.2. It should work on older versions as well, on the whole.

The tutorials include instructions for both Linux and Windows XP. OS X developers should be able to follow the Linux instructions in general, making slight alterations as needed for your platform. Windows Vista users should be able to follow the Windows XP instructions in general, tweaking the steps to deal with Vista's directory structure and revised Start menu.

If you wish to use the source code from the CommonsWare Web site, bear in mind a few things:

• 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.
• 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.

Also, please note that the tutorials are set up to work well on HVGA and larger screen sizes. Using them on QVGA or similar sizes is not recommended.

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