Monday, April 23, 2012

Professional Android 4 Application Development: Because I only work in powers of 2

Professional Android 4 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.

Professional Android 4 Application Development cover image
Where to buy

If you're interested in picking up a copy, you can get the paperback delivered to your door from these fine retailers:
If you prefer to travel light, there's an electronic version to suit your tastes:
I'm particularly pleased with the electronic editions of this release, which are significantly better than those of Professional Android 2. It's nice to see that this time they're  out at the same time as the paperbacks.

What's new?

This edition is a monster. Everything has been revised and expanded, with four new chapters and more than 300 extra pages (that's around 50% more) added since Professional Android 2.

Some of the highlights amongst the new content include:
  • Fragments and the Action Bar
  • CursorLoaders
  • The audio focus APIs
  • NFC, Wi-Fi Direct, and Android Beam
  • Using the Intent Service
  • A new chapter on publishing your app to Google Play
  • Introductions to LVL, IAB, and C2DM
  • Creating collection-based widgets and rich notifications
  • Using new sensors (including the barometer)
  • Property animations
  • Accessibility 
  • Implementing copy and paste
Some context

The whole thing took me a touch over a year to write. I started writing an update for Gingerbread and Honeycomb back in March of 2011 and before I'd finished, Ice Cream Sandwich dropped and I found myself doing some frantic rewrites and adding a few extra pages.

That means it's been two years between revisions, and as Professional Android 4 rolls off the presses there have been 8(!) platform releases.

Professional Android 2 was released within a few weeks of Android 2.1. As of now, 87% of devices are running a newer build of Android. The Android ecosystem has grown to include tablets, with more than 800 different Android devices created by 55 OEMs and available on over 300 carriers.

More than 850k new Android devices are activated daily, with the 450k+ apps in Google Play having been downloaded more than 10 billions time.

Support

You can download all the code snippets and sample projects used in the book from the Wrox Open Source site.

If you've got any questions related to the book, you can post them over at the Wrox P2P forums. For anything programming related, I'd recommend using Stack Overflow (and adding a PA4AD tag). I'll be monitoring both and endeavoring to answer promptly.

I've created a +Professional Android 4 Application Development Google+ Page, and you can always get in touch with me over at Twitter or on Google+.