Have you ever wanted to be a Rodin? Sitting with a chisel and eroding away a block of rock to mold it to your vision? Well, mainstream programmers have kept away from the severely constrained mobile devices for fear of being unable to chisel out a workable application. Those times are past.

Android OS places programmatically unconstrained mobile devices(with an incredible reach) at your door step. In this book we want to positively confirm your suspicion that Android is a great OS to program with. If you are a Java programmer, you have a wonderful opportunity to profit from the Android OS, an exciting, capable, and general-purpose computing platform. Despite being a mobile OS, the Android OS has introduced new paradigms in framework design.

This is our fourth edition on the subject of Android, and it?s our best edition yet. Pro Android 4 is an extensive programming guide for the Android 4.0 SDK (The first SDK of Android to cover both phones and tablets). In this edition we've refined, rewritten, and enhanced a number of things from Pro Android 3 to create a thoroughly updated guide for both beginners and professionals. Pro Android 4 is a result of our four years of research. We cover over 100 topics in 31 chapters.

In this edition we have beefed up Android internals by covering threads, processes, long running services, broadcast receivers, alarm managers, device configuration changes, and asynchronous tasks. We have over 150 pages of dedicated material on fragments, fragment dialogs, ActionBar, and drag and drop. We have significantly enhanced the services and sensor chapters. The animation chapter has been significantly revised to include property based animations. The chapter on the contacts API is also largely rewritten to take into account the personal profile that paves the way for the Social API.

Concepts, Code, and Tutorials are the essence of this book. Every chapter in the book reflects this philosophy. The self-contained tutorials in each chapter are annotated with expert advice. All projects in the book are available for download for easy importing into Eclipse.

Finally, in this book we went beyond basics, asked tough questions on every topic, and documented the results (see the table of contents for the extensive list of what we cover in the book). We are also actively updating the supplemental website (androidbook.com) with current and future research material on the Android SDK. As you walk through the book, if you have any questions we are only an email away for a quick response.