hello, Todd!

how can I help you today?

Hi Mark

Sorry, I was planning to connect at the beginning of the hour, but lost track of time.

I have a couple questions...

fire away!

First, I've been getting a lot of good information from your book - well written, especially for such a technical subject. And I really appreciate your arrangement of core topics and tangents for deeper exploration. So, my question is, what is the best way to provide feedback or to ask questions for clarification about what I am reading?

um, well, you could use these chats :-)

if the feedback is a bug report, shoot me an email at bounty@commonsware.com

I didn't want to interfere with others who might be here wanting to chat with you. But if there are often times like this, then perhaps that could work.

sometimes there are a few people the chat, sometimes not

I basically go round-robin with all of the chatters, to give everyone a shot at questions

also, if you can phrase your questions as general purpose (not strictly tied to the book), post them on Stack Overflow, and use the "bump" service to get me to answer them if they get no love

and I may restore my long-discontinued subscriber discussion group in the coming months, which would give you yet another option

Can you explain the "bump" service? My second question was that I have a couple posts on SO that aren't getting much response, and I'm kinda stuck at the moment.

on your Warescription page, in the nav bar at the top, go to Other > Stack Overflow Bumpt

er, Bump

you can paste in a URL of a question

if the question is in the android tag and is 24+ hours old, I'll get an email to go take a look at it

you can bump one question per week

OK

usually, I'll either respond with an answer, a comment, or possibly an email if I cannot really address the question (and you have an email address in your Warescription profile)

and that's a wrap for today's chat

I will post the transcript to https://commonsware.com/office-hours/ shortly

One overall comment... I have noticed that SO is good for getting code snippets or asking for feedback about code details. And there are lots of YouTube how-to videos that say, "write this..." But it seems like there are few resources for really understanding the basic concepts. Most of the developer resources from Android are written like reference material, to help people remember the details of stuff already learned. But not really that helpful for learning. More visual diagrams would be most helpful. So I would suggest that for your book, as well. I find example code, with explanations, but I don't really understand, why is it being architected this way? Or what is the architecture?

"The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development" is not really focused on architecture

architecture depends a fair bit on the nature of the app

I will get more into architecture in the companion volume "Android's Architecture Components", over time

I'll explain more some other time.

OK

the next chat is tomorrow at 7:30pm

thanks

have a pleasant day!