The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development Version 5.2 Released

Subscribers now have access to the latest release of The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development, known as Version 5.2, in all formats. Just log into your Warescription page and download away, or set up an account and subscribe!

This chapter adds over 100 pages, though it loses the OUYA chapter, as previously noted.

This update contains:

• The first two of several chapters on Gradle, introducing Gradle itself and covering fairly basic Gradle-based builds of projects using the classic directory structure. Gradle coverage will continue to be expanded over the next few updates to the book.

• A chapter on navigation drawers, focusing on DrawerLayout.

• A chapter on miscellaneous security, mostly covering how to examine the public key of the keystore that was used to sign an APK.

• A chapter on event buses, comprising an expanded version of the previous LocalBroadcastManager coverage, plus Square’s Otto and greenrobot’s EventBus.

• Expanded coverage (again!) of Maps V2, adding in flat markers and marker rotation, updating an info window (e.g., with an asynchronously downloaded image), marker animation, and improvements to other samples.

• More material on foreground services, device administration and password management, and animating arbitrary data types.

• Miscellaneous updates and errata fixes.

If Android 4.4 ships in the next week or so, I will aim to have another book update out by mid-November that begins to address it. Otherwise, the next update probably will not be until the end of November, or possibly early December, again based in part on the release timing of Android 4.4.