Have you ever wanted to be a Rodin? Sitting with a chisel and erode away a block of rock to mold it to your vision? Well, the main stream programmers have kept away from the severly constrained mobile devices for fear of being unable to chisel out at a workable application. Those times have passed.

Android OS places the incredible reach of a programmable device 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 great opportunity to profit from this exciting capable general purpose computing platform. We are excited about Android because it is an advanced platform that introduces a number of new paradigms in framework design (even with the limitations of a mobile platform).

This is our third edition on the subject of Android. This is our best edition yet. ProAndroid3 is an extensive programming guide. In this 3rd edition we've refined, rewritten and enhanced everything from Pro Android 2 to create a thorough guide for both beginers and professionals - the result of over 3 years of research. We cover over 100 topics in 31 chapters. This edition covers both 2.3 and 3.0 of Android, the respective optimized versions of Android for phones and tablets.

Int this edition we have beefed up Android internals by covering threads, processes, long running services, broad cast receivers, and alarm managers. We cover many more UI controls in this edition. We have over 150 pages of dedicated material on 3.0 covering fragments, fragment dialogs, actionbar, drag and drop. We have significatnly enhanced services and sensor chapters. OpenGL has been revised to include OpenGL ES 2.0.

Concepts, Code, and Tutorials are the essensce 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 as a zip file for downloads.

We have worked hard so that the code can also be compiled right out of the book. The list of files that goes into each project are explicitely catalogued and listed in each chapter for easy reference.

The areas we cover in the book include key concepts such as resources, intents, content providers, processes, threads, UI controls, broadcast receivers, services, and long running services. We have a lot of coverage on OpenGL ES 1.0 and 2.0 for OpenGL beginers. We have a lot of coverage on text to speeach, sensors, and multi-touch. We are also able to incorporate lot of coverage on 3.0 topics that include fragments, fragment dialogs, Actionbar and Drag and drop.

Finally, in this book we went beyound basics and asked tough questions on every topic and documented the results. See the table of contents for an extensive list of what we cover in the book. (See the table of contents for the extensive list of what we cover in the book)

we are also actively updating supplimental website (www.androidbook.com) for 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.