Preface
The purpose of this book is to enable you to create well-engineered Android applications that go beyond the scope of small example applications.
This book is for people coming to Android programming from a variety of backgrounds. If you have been programming iPhone or Mac OS applications in Objective-C, you will find coverage of Android tools and Java language features relevant to Android programming that will help you bring your knowledge of mobile application development to Android. If you are an experienced Java coder, you will find coverage of Android application architecture that will enable you to use your Java expertise in this newly vibrant world of client Java application development. In short, this is a book for people with some relevant experience in object-oriented languages, mobile applications, REST applications, and similar disciplines who want to go further than an introductory book or online tutorials will take them.
How This Book Is Organized
We want to get you off to a fast start. The chapters in the first part of this book will step you through using the SDK tools so that you can access example code in this book and in the SDK, even as you expand your knowledge of SDK tools, Java, and database design. The tools and basics covered in the first part might be familiar enough to you that you would want to skip to Part II where we build foundational knowledge for developing larger Android applications.
The central part of this book is an example of an application ...