Monday, February 22, 2010

Professional Android 2 Application Development: This Time It's Personal

Professional Android 2 Application Development, started shipping today (Monday) from Amazon US - so those of you who pre-ordered should be seeing your copies in a couple of days. I'm really excited and can’t wait to find out what people think.

A lot has happened in the year since Professional Android was released. In November of 2008 version 1.0 of the Android SDK had only just been released. There was one handset (the G1) on one carrier (T-Mobile) in one country (the US).

What's new?

As Professional Android 2 rolls off the presses there have been 6 new platform releases (up to Android 2.1), and Android is now available on 26 handsets in 48 countries on 58 carriers.

Understandably much of the original Professional Android material is now out-of-date. Accordingly, Professional Android 2 has been totally revised and expanded to cover all the changed and new API features introduced in the past year up to and including Android 2.1.

That includes the new Bluetooth API, Widgets and Live Wallpaper, the updated contacts and Sensor APIs, the new ASyncTasks and Services framework, as well as expanded sections covering using the camera, microphone, and media framework.

In all there are an extra five chapters and over 100 more pages.

Oh, and there's a new cover image that is so awesome it's almost enough to justify replacing the older copy by itself.

Where to buy


If you're interested in a copy the best place for you to buy a paper copy of the book is from Amazon using one of these links:
I'm also particularly excited to say that you can also purchase Professional Android 2 as DRM-free e-book PDF from the Wrox website:
Every concept in the book is supported with code snippets and a bunch of detailed step-by-step examples -- all of which you can download from the Wrox Open Source site.

Android development conversation

I'll be looking to answer Android questions at the Wrox P2P forums, Stack Overflow, and the Android Google Groups.

For more information on Android and the book you can follow me on Twitter or Buzz. I'll tweet any 'bugs' and changes to the text or code samples, as well as updates on any SDK releases that cause book code samples to break.