The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development Version 3.6 Released

Subscribers now have access to the latest release of The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development, known as Version 3.6. EPUB and Kindle editions are available now, with PDFs ready within the hour.

This update is mostly about fragments. There is a new chapter on fragments themselves, including the Android Compatibility Library for allowing fragments to work on earlier versions of Android. There is also coverage of the new fragment-based preference UI in the preferences chapter, plus some notes on getting maps and fragments to work together in the chapter on maps.

Since one feature of fragments meant I could no longer dance around the topic of styles, I buckled down and finally tossed together a short chapter on the subject. Many thanks to Al Sutton for his assistance in making sure I’m doing a decent job of covering the subject.

I also wound up reordering some chapters to help make the fragments material flow better.

There is another chapter on alternative Android development frameworks, with short sections on tools like Rhodes, Adobe AIR, and so on. Some of those may get full chapters like HTML5 and PhoneGap have in future editions of the book.

Beyond that, it’s mostly errata fixes.

This book should be updated again in the next couple of months as a Version 3.9, leading eventually to the 4.0 milestone edition.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, complaints, etc. regarding the book, please join the cw-android Google Group and post there!