Pro Android 4

This is our fourth edition on the subject of Android, and it’s our best edition yet. Pro Android 4 is an extensive programming guide for the Android 4.0 SDK (the first SDK of Android to cover both phones and tablets). In this edition, we've refined, rewritten, and enhanced a number of things from Pro Android 3 to create a thoroughly updated guide for both beginners and professionals. Pro Android 4 is a result of our four years of research. We cover more than 100 topics in 31 chapters. In this edition, we have beefed up our discussion of Android internals by covering threads, processes, long-running services, broadcast receivers, alarm managers, device configuration changes, and asynchronous tasks. We dedicate over 150 pages of material to fragments, fragment dialogs, ActionBar, and drag and drop. We have significantly enhanced the services and sensor chapters. The animation chapter has been revised to include property-based animations. The chapter on the contacts API is also largely rewritten to take into account the personal profile that paves the way for the Social API. Concepts, code, and tutorials are the essence of this book. Every chapter reflects this philosophy. The self-contained tutorials in each chapter are annotated with expert advice. All projects in the book are available for download for easy importing into Eclipse. Finally, in this book we went beyond basics, asked tough questions on every topic, and documented the results (see the table of contents for the extensive list of what we cover). We are also actively updating the supplemental web site (www.androidbook.com) with current and future research material on the Android SDK. As you walk through the book, if you have any questions, we are only an e-mail away for a quick response.