Dev Connection

Ed Burnette

Get 30% off "Hello, Android" book

By Ed Burnette | January 8, 2009, 12:11am PST

Summary: It’s out! My new book, Hello, Android, is back from the printers: “Android combines the ubiquity of cell phones, the excitement of open source software, and the corporate backing of Google and other Open Handset Alliance members. The result is a mobile platform you can’t afford not to learn. This book will get you started.” As a [...]

It’s out! My new book, Hello, Android, is back from the printers:

“Android combines the ubiquity of cell phones, the excitement of open source software, and the corporate backing of Google and other Open Handset Alliance members. The result is a mobile platform you can’t afford not to learn. This book will get you started.”

As a special thank-you to my ZDNet readers, you can now get 30% off the purchase price by entering the coupon code “zdnetHelloAndroid09″ at the checkout. This offer expires 01/31/09. Enjoy!

[ Read: More about Android on Dev Connection and Planet Android. ]

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Mobile, Android, Advertising & Promotion, Printers, Marketing, Hardware, Peripherals, Ed Burnette

Ed Burnette is a software industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience as a programmer, author, and speaker. He has written numerous technical articles and books, most recently "Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform" from the Pragmatic Programmers.

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RE: Get 30% off

gavin.chan 20th Sep

Yes,this is a good idea about andriod book. You can buy andriod tablets from China at low price.

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Cool.

CobraA1 Updated - 8th Jan 2009

Running on a bit of a tight budget here, so unlikely to buy before the coupon expires, but looks like a cool book.

. . . and reading from the extracts, I'm seeing words like "activity" and "intent" in the source code - I understand this is some sort of new way of programming that I've seen floating around, but never bothered to investigate. I don't suppose somebody could give a quick explanation of those terms, and where to find more information?

Edit: For those like me who keep a wish list in Amazon.com, the book is located here (I've created a snipurl):

http://snipurl.com/helloandroid

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Activity and Intent

Ed Burnette 8th Jan 2009

An activity is a user interface screen. Applications can define one or more activities to handle different phases of the program. Each activity is responsible for saving its own state so that it can be restored later as part of the application life cycle.

An intent is a mechanism for describing a specific action, such as ?pick a photo,? ?phone home,? or ?open the pod bay doors.? In Android, just about everything goes through intents, so you have plenty of opportunities to replace or reuse components. For example, there is an intent for ?send an email.? If your application needs to send mail, you can invoke that intent. Or if you?re writing a new email application, you can register an activity to handle that intent and replace the standard mail program. The next time somebody tries to send an email, they?ll get your program instead of the standard one.

[Excerpted from Chapter 2, Hello Android]

BTW, the coupon is only good on the Pragmatic Programmer's site, www.pragprog.com.

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Obviously...

ShadowGIATL 19th Jan 2009

programming has evolved since I was in college. I'm feeling a bit older now.

Sounds like a good way of doing things though.

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RE: Get 30% off

radio_babylon 9th Jan 2009

please consider releasing this for the kindle. i dont do paper books anymore.

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Re: Kindle edition

Ed Burnette 9th Jan 2009

That's a great idea. You can send in your vote for this by going to the Amazon page for the book (search for hello android) and clicking on the link that says "I?d like to read this book on Kindle". All the votes go to the publisher and then they decide whether or not there's enough demand to produce a new format.

In the meantime there's an all electronic PDF version of the book available from pragprog.com . I don't have a Kindle but I understand you can mail PDF files to your Kindle address and it will convert and load them on your device so you can read them there (see http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200140600 )