Obviously, this book does not cover everything. And while your primary resource (besides the book) is the Android SDK documentation, you are likely to need information from additional sources.
Searching online for “android” and a class name is a good way to locate tutorials that reference a given Android class. However, bear in mind that Android’s pace of change means tutorials written even only a few years ago are probably written for much earlier SDK versions and, as such, will require considerable adjustment to work properly in current SDKs.
Instead of randomly hunting around for tutorials, you can use some of the resources outlined in this chapter to narrow your search.
The official places to get assistance with Android are the Android Google Groups. With respect to the SDK, there are two to consider:
groups.google.com/group/android-developers
), for SDK questions and answershttp://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss
), designed for free-form discussion of anything Android-related, not necessarily for programming questions and answersYou might also consider the following resources, particularly StackOverflow, which is increasingly considered the best place to receive help:
android
tag (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android
)www.anddev.org
http://andmob.wikidot.com/
)#android-dev
IRC channel on freenode (http://freenode.net/
)www.coderanch.com/forums/f-93/Android
)It is important, particularly for StackOverflow and the Google Groups, to write informative questions. Following are some tips for writing effective questions:
http://gist.github.com
or a similar code-paste site.@
syntax (e.g., @CommonsWare
), to maximize the odds you will get a reply.The source code to Android is now available, albeit several versions behind the current Android 4.0 release. Mostly, this is for people who are looking to enhance, improve, or otherwise fuss with the insides of the Android operating system. But it is possible that you will find the answers you seek in that code, particularly if you want to see how some built-in Android component does its thing.
NOTE: Google has promised it will release the source code for Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, in the near future. Such a release is becoming increasingly important, as the existing version available on http://source.android.com
is 2.3, which is growing long in the tooth. As previously stated by Google, the source for the 3.x versions is unlikely ever to be released, as 4.0 is the preferred merged code base for all future editions.
The source code and related resources can be found at http://source.android.com
, where you can do the following:
Rather than download the multigigabyte Android source code snapshot, you may wish to use Google Code Search (www.google.com/codesearch
) instead. Just add the package:android
constraint to your search query, and it will search only in Android and related projects.
Ed Burnette, a nice guy who happened to write his own Android book, is also the manager of Planet Android (www.planetandroid.com
), a feed aggregator for a number of Android-related blogs. Subscribing to Planet Android’s feed enables you to monitor quite a few Android-related blog posts, though not exclusively related to programming.
To try to focus more on programming-related, Android-referencing blog posts, you can search DZone (www.dzone.com
) for “android” and subscribe to a feed based on that search.
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