Android™ Development Patterns: Best Practices for Professional Developers

Description

There’s a downside to Android’s amazing openness and versatility: it’s easy for developers to write code that’s inefficient, unreliable, insecure, or hard to maintain. In Android Development Patterns, enterprise Android developer Phil Dutson helps you leverage Android 5.0+’s amazing power without falling victim to those pitfalls. Dutson presents today’s most comprehensive set of patterns and procedures for building optimized, robust apps with Android 5.0+.

First, Dutson guides you through establishing a highly efficient development environment and workflow, and testing your app to ensure that your code works just as you expect. Then, he walks through the modern best practices for structuring apps, using widgets and components, and working with views.

You learn how to build apps that are easy to manage and update, deliver accurate and up-to-date information without wasting precious battery power, and take advantage of new hardware, such as Android Wear and Android TV. Dutson concludes by presenting powerful strategies for optimizing your apps and packaging them for distribution.

Coverage includes

• Using testing to build more trustworthy, dependable, maintainable apps
• Understanding subtle but critical differences between Android and traditional Java programming
• Building consistent, modern user interfaces with views and layouts
• Leveraging the proven MVC pattern to cleanly organize logic
• Creating rich visual experiences with 3D graphics, animation, and media
• Simplifying capture and use of location data with the new Locations API
• Integrating optional hardware, such as Bluetooth, NFC, or USB
• Building better apps with Google Play Services
• Creating Android Wear notifications and apps
• Tuning and improving apps with Google Analytics
• Designing Android TV apps for the “ten foot view”

Reviews

“A must read for all developers that want to begin serious Android development.” — Justin Anderson, Freelance Android Developer

“From start to finish, this book contains a variety of great tips and insight into the most important attributes of Android design. This book will definitely be required reading for any of our future Android engineers.” — Cameron Banga, Cofounder, 9magnets, LLC

Author Biography

Phillip Dutson started down the path of geekdom at an early age when his father brought home a broken 8086 computer and helped him fix it up. Several years later he helped destroy and return to life a monochrome-display 386 “laptop”. His education continued when he was given his first Palm Pilot 5000 and used it until the screen wore out. Having fallen absolutely head-over-heels in love with mobile devices he eventually traded up to a Palm Vx, a Cassiopeia, and then several rounds of smart-phones. He currently keeps a nice menagerie of both iOS and Android devices. With years of practical and personal experience, he has decided to share his knowledge to help everyone discover what they have been missing on the mobile front. He is also a lead eCommerce and Front End Developer for one of the world’s largest fitness manufacturers, and enjoys developing and creating all things related to the web.