The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development Version 5.9 Released

Subscribers now have access to the latest release of The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development, known as Version 5.9, in all formats. Just log into your Warescription page and download away, or set up an account and subscribe!

This updates begins the Big Book Pivot of 2014. Of note on the pivot:

• All of the samples in the trails chapters have been de-Sherlocked, using the native action bar and fragments. They also all have build.gradle files, albeit ones using the classic Eclipse project structure and relying upon libs/ instead of Maven dependencies.

• The tutorials have also been de-Sherlocked, using the native action bar and fragments. They also have been updated to simplify them somewhat (e.g., get rid of DownloadManager dependnecy) and use better techniques (e.g., event bus instead of broadcasts).

For those of you who are part-way through the tutorials using an earlier edition of the book, you are probably best suited to continue using the earlier edition. Your alternative will be to start over.

Also, the sheer number of changes means that it looks like a lot of the chapters were updated, though in many cases it is mostly just changing superclasses, imports, and the like.

Beyond the pivot work, this update includes:

• A new chapter on the Android 4.4 printing framework

• A new chapter on creating a MediaRouteProvider, to allow RemotePlaybackClient-enabled apps to work with your own custom remote media player

• A completely rewritten chapter on BlackBerry, to bring the coverage up to speed for the 10.3 BlackBerry OS and its Android runtime

• Improvements to the coverage of Gradle, Presentation, inSampleSize, and Fire TV

• Various errata fixes

The next update will be the milestone Version 6.0 (“Motto: Trying To Stay Ahead of Android Version Numbers”). This update will include Android Studio coverage, specifically:

• Android Studio instructions will be added to the tutorials, along with changing the tutorials’ command-line instructions to move to Gradle and away from Ant

• Covering Android Studio equivalents to everything in the book that covers Eclipse

• Adding Gradle build files for all of the core chapters’ samples, and ensuring that all of the projects can be loaded into Android Studio (despite using the Eclipse project structure for most of them, to maintain compatibility with Eclipse)

I also plan to clean up all of the core chapters, with rewrites as needed.

I will cover bits and pieces of new material, but not that much, along the lines of today’s Version 5.9. Once the pivot is behind me, I can return to my regular focus on expanding coverage in new areas, with a particular 2014 emphasis on “L”.

Version 6.0 is tentatively slated for release in early September.