Asynchronous Android

My book is published!

Its been an incredible learning experience - I read a lot of tech books, and find them invaluable, but if you really want to learn about something, try writing a book about it - the desire to deliver value to your readers with broad and deep coverage, and to not get things wrong, really focuses the mind!

Here's the cover and the marketing blurb I originally wrote, but which the publishers only used in part. I laboured over it for ages, so I figured I'd post it all here:

With more than a million apps available from Google Play, it is more important than ever to build apps that stand out from the crowd. To be successful, apps must react quickly to user-input, deliver results in a flash, and sync data in the background. The key to this is understanding the right way to implement asynchronous operations that work with the platform, instead of against it.

Asynchronous Android is a practical book that guides you through the concurrency constructs provided by the Android platform, illustrating the applications, benefits, and pitfalls of each.

There's so much more to Android than Activities and Fragments. To get the best from modern Android devices, developers must look to unlock the power of multi-core CPU's. Concurrency is hard, but Google's engineers have worked miracles to build a platform that makes asynchronous programming natural and fun.

In this book you will:

Learn to use AsyncTask correctly to perform operations in the background, keeping user-interfaces running smoothly while avoiding treacherous memory leaks.

Discover Handler, HandlerThread and Looper, the related and fundamental building blocks of asynchronous programming in Android.

Escape from the constraints of the Activity lifecycle to load and cache data efficiently across your entire application with the Loader framework.

Keep your data fresh with scheduled tasks, and understand how Services let your application continue to run in the background, even when the user is busy with something else.

Key Points:

• Understand Android's process model and its implications for your applications
• Exercise multi-threading correctly to build well-behaved Android apps that work with the platform, not against it
• Apply and control concurrency to deliver results quickly and keep your apps responsive to user-input
• Avoid the common pitfalls that catch out even experienced developers
• Discover Android-specific constructs that make asynchronous programming easy and efficient
• Learn how, when, and why to apply Android's concurrency constructs to build smooth, response apps

Asynchronous Android will help you to build well-behaved apps with smooth, responsive user-interfaces; delight your users with speedy results and data that's always fresh; and keep the system happy and the battery charged by playing by the rules.

Right now you can get the book direct from Packt Publishing, and Barnes and Noble.

The links for Amazon US, Amazon UK, OReilly, and Safari aren't active yet, but should be by the time you read this.

A free sample chapter should be available from the Packt page soon - I believe it will be Chapter 7, Scheduling work with AlarmManager.

The source code for all of the examples is available from GitHub, and if you can download a pre-built app that runs all of the examples from Google Play.