Android Studio... and the Book

I am sure that the first thing that crossed your mind when you heard the announcement of Android Studio is “when will that balding guy be covering it in his book?”

Well, OK, maybe that wasn’t the first thing that crossed your mind, but it sure as $BLEEP was the first thing that crossed my mind.

Over the next several months, I’ll add some chapters covering Android Studio and the new Gradle-based build system, in a new trail in the book.

Once Android Studio is “for realz” — meaning that Google drops the “early access preview” label and starts pointing people to it in earnest — I will work on “mainstreaming” Android Studio and the Gradle-based build system coverage, notably in the tutorials. The set of chapters I write originally will remain for a while, aiming at people migrating to these new tools from Eclipse and/or the classic build system. Other chapters will be added covering advanced topics related to the new build system. However, since I have no real idea how rapidly Android Studio will move from 0.1 to “for realz”, I do not know how quickly this “mainstreaming” will occur.

Another wrinkle will be if they start shipping support for the new build system in Eclipse before Android Studio hits “for realz” status. In that case, I may wind up rolling out the new coverage in stages, updating the tutorials and such first for the new build system, then updating it later for Android Studio.

Unfortunately, this will take a lot of time, time that’s going to come out of advancing the book in other areas as quickly as I’d like. I apologize in advance for that.