Dave MacLean, Sayed Hashimi, and I have been working on the Android platform since 2009. Allen Grant from Google has just joined hands with us to take our expertise to the next level. We have been in IT for the last 20 years. We bring that experience to study Android not only as a host of mobile applications but also from an OS perspective.

We started this work first with the Pro Android series. The goal of this series is to unravel the feature rich, yet well known APIs of Android. The hall mark of this work is to cover as much ground as possible to give a broad yet an indepth view of all of android.

The Expert series on other hand, of which we have the first book out, is dedicated to give extra leverage for the app developer by bringing together core APIs and also external APIs that might work well for writing compelling applications. For example in the first edition of Expert Android we wrote about how to design custom UI components in Android. This topic is important for writing compelling applications. We have covered this aspect in over 3 chapters. We also included topics that let you develop apps really fast. We have also included coverage on Parse.com to let you develop apps that are collaborative and that can store data in the cloud. Yes we do cover push notifications through the parse API.

Importantly we are committed to the Android platform. We hope you learn and profit from these books. We have put a lot of work year after year into these books and they are getting better with each iteration. We hope you like our latest offers. If you don't we intend to please you as we are hard at work for the next set of topics on Android.