The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development Version 8.8 Released

Subscribers now have access to the latest release of The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development, known as Version 8.8, in all formats. Just log into your Warescription page and download away, or set up an account and subscribe!

Mostly, this update is about Android Studio 3.0 and the corresponding version of the Android Gradle Plugin and Gradle itself. This includes:

  • Updating the tutorials

  • Making major changes to all of the Gradle coverage, both in the core chapters and the trails

  • Adding a new chapter on icons, specifically to explain the new Image Asset Wizard and the adaptive icon stuff

  • Replacing the chapter on dependencies with a brand-new edition

  • Updating all of the places that used Jack-based lambda expressions to use the new native ones, and updating all of the Rx samples to use lambda expressions

  • Updating all the samples to use implementation instead of compile, using flavor dimensions wherever product flavors were used, etc.

  • Making significant changes to some performance tuning chapters to reflect the changes in Android Studio’s profiling tools

A few chapters were removed as a result of this. Some were redudant chapters in the Gradle coverage. Also, the Android Things chapter was removed, to not violate the Android Things Console terms of service. And, the chapter on writing reusable components was removed, as it was just scary old.

This update also brings us up to speed with the final release of Android 8.0 and has your usual smattering of other miscellaneous fixes and improvements.

The combination of all of these changes, plus standardizing on “Logcat” instead of “LogCat” and related nomenclature changes, means that there are a lot of sections with updates that will show up in bold-italic in the table of contents.

For those with the APK edition of the book, there is a new appinar, on GraphQL and Android, tied to the book GraphQL and Android.

There should be another update to this book before the end of 2017.