Welcome to the source code for The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development!

About the Book

The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development is a book covering Android application development, from basics through advanced capabilities. It is updated several times a year and is available through the Warescription program. Subscribers also have access to office hours chats and other benefits.

This repository contains the source code for the hundreds of sample apps profiled in the book. These samples are updated as the book is, with git tags applied to tie sample code versions to book versions.

The book, and the samples, were written by Mark Murphy. You may also have run into him through Stack Overflow:

About the Code

All of the source code in this archive is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license except as noted.

The names of the top-level directories roughly correspond to a shortened form of the chapter titles. Since chapter numbers change with every release, and since some samples are used by multiple chapters, I am loathe to put chapter numbers in the actual directory names.

Using in Android Studio

Most of the projects should have a build.gradle file suitable for importing the project into Android Studio. Note, though, that you may need to adjust the compileSdkVersion in build.gradle if it requests an SDK that you have not downloaded and do not wish to download. Similarly, you may need to adjust the buildToolsVersion value to refer to a version of the "Build-tools" that you have downloaded from the SDK Manager.

The samples also have stub Gradle wrapper files, enough to allow for easy import into Android Studio. However, always check the gradle-wrapper.properties file before importing anything into Android Studio, as there is always the chance that somebody has published material linking you to a hacked Gradle installation.

Using with Command-Line Gradle

Right now, you will need your own local installation of Gradle 2.1 in order to build the projects from the command line, as the repository does not contain gradlew or its corresponding JAR for security reasons.

Using in Eclipse

These projects can be imported using the normal Eclipse import process. That being said, importing all the projects is probably a really bad idea, simply because there are so many of them. Import select projects, if and when you need them.

Note, though, that you will have to fix some things up, particularly if you are getting errors:

• The build target of the project may be an Android SDK that you do not have installed. You will need to set the project build target to something that you have, by means of Project Properties.

• A few of these projects use ActionBarSherlock or other Android library projects. You will need to attach a suitable copy of those projects to your app. For example, there is a copy of a compatible ActionBarSherlock in external/, and the project files are set up to reference that copy. If you import it first, your imports of other sample apps should go more smoothly. Alternatively, you can download and set up ActionBarSherlock yourself in your Eclipse workspace, then go into Project Properties and point the book's project to use your copy of the ActionBarSherlock library project.

• Some of these projects are not set up to support Eclipse, because the nature of the project is to demonstrate something specific for Android Studio or Gradle for Android.

• Some of these projects are not set up to support Eclipse, as Eclipse is no longer officially supported by Google, and so the author of the book is focusing more on Android Studio. If the project looks like an Eclipse-style project (e.g., has res/ and the manifest in the project root directory), but it lacks the Eclipse .classpath and .project files, you should be able to import the code into Eclipse anyway. However, you will have to set up your own links to libraries that the project depends upon (e.g., appcompat-v7).

• Many of the book samples, and ActionBarSherlock, require your Java compiler compliance level to be set to 1.6, so code can use the @Override annotation on interface method implementations. You can find this in Project Properties, in the Java Compiler area.

• Restarting Eclipse, for whatever reason, can clear up some undefined problems indicated by red exclamation marks over the project name in the Project Explorer.