The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development Version 4.9 Released

Subscribers now have access to the latest release of The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development, known as Version 4.9, in all formats. Just log into your Warescription page and download away, or set up an account and subscribe!

First off, I have removed the C2DM chapter, as anyone using C2DM has hopefully migrated to GCM instead. Subscribers still using C2DM should hold onto a copy of an earlier edition in addition to downloading newer ones!

Beyond that, there are a fair number of improvements:

  • The chapter on sensors, retired long ago, has been rewritten and restored

  • There is a new chapter on using uiautomator for UI testing

  • The book also has a new chapter on using the fused location provider, from the Play Services enhancements announced at Google I|O 2013

  • The advanced ViewPager chapter was extended with a walkthrough of the usage and implementation of ArrayPagerAdapter, a more flexible fragment-based PagerAdapter implementation

  • The large-screen support chapter has a new version of the “EU4You” sample that uses SlidingPaneLayout (also introduced at Google I|O 2013), and the sensor sample app also demonstrates SlidingPaneLayout

  • The explanation of how resources are selected by the system was substantially overhauled

  • The coverage of Maps V2 was updated to reflect recent changes, such as being able to detect OpenGL ES 2.0 support at runtime (to fail over to another mapping option on older devices) and the deprecation of some location-tracking options

  • The book also sports various miscellaneous improvements and errata fixes, per usual

Also, users of the book in APK format who were encountering problems using the action bar home affordance to return to the table of contents should no longer run into that issue.

The next update (5.0!) is tentatively scheduled for mid-July.

 

Meta


Creative Commons License