Chapter 39

Where Do We Go from Here?

Obviously, this book does not cover everything. And while your main resource (besides the book) is the Android SDK documentation, you are likely to need more information.

Searching online for “android” and a class name is a good way to turn up tutorials that reference a given Android class. However, bear in mind that tutorials written before late August 2008 are probably written for the M5 SDK and, as such, will require considerable adjustment to work properly in current SDKs.

Beyond randomly hunting around for tutorials, you can use some of the resources outlined in this chapter.

Questions—Sometimes with Answers

The official places to get assistance with Android are the Android Google Groups. With respect to the SDK, there are three to consider:

• android-beginners, a great place to ask entry-level questions
• android-developers, best suited for more complicated questions or ones that delve into less-used portions of the SDK
• android-discuss, designed for free-form discussion of anything Android-related, not necessarily for programming questions and answers

You might also consider these resources:

• The Android tutorials and programming forums over at http://anddev.org
• The Open Mob for Android wiki (http://wiki.andmob.org/)
• The #android IRC channel on freenode
• StackOverflow’s android and android-sdk tags
• The Android board on JavaRanch

Heading to the Source

The source code to Android is now available. Mostly, this is for people 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.

The source code and related resources can be found at http://source.android.com. Here, you can do the following:

• Download or browse the source code.
• File bug reports against the operating system itself.
• Submit patches and learn about the process for how such patches are evaluated and approved.
• Join a separate set of Google Groups for Android platform development.

Rather than download the multigigabyte Android source code snapshot, you may wish to use Google Code Search instead (http://www.google.com/codesearch). Just add the android:package constraint to your search query, and it will search only in Android and related projects.

Getting Your News Fix

Ed Burnette, a nice guy who happened to write his own Android book, is also the manager of Planet Android (http://www.planetandroid.com/), a feed aggregator for a number of Android-related blogs. Subscribing to the planet’s feed will let you monitor 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 for “android” and subscribe to a feed based on that search.