The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development Version 6.8 Released

Subscribers now have
access to the latest release of The Busy Coder���s Guide to Android Development,
known as Version 6.8, in all formats. Just log into
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First, here is what has been added:

Version 6.7 added an appendix on the M Developer Preview. Version
6.8 updates that for Android 6.0. Some of the material that had been
in the appendix has moved to more permanent homes, with links to
that material from the appendix.

I have added a standalone tutorial, independent from the EmPubLite
series, for upgrading an app to use the new Android 6.0 runtime
permission model. Given a starting app that uses the camera to take
pictures and record videos, the tutorial will help you progressively
add the logic to that app to handle requesting runtime permissions,
both up-front and on-demand. I will be going through this tutorial
live at droidcon NYC 2015 and DC DevFest 2015.

Android Studio 1.3 was released since the last book update,
so this update tweaks the book, particularly Tutorial #1 and
Tutorial #2, for Android Studio 1.3.

I have added a new chapter on the Android 5.0+ native Toolbar widget,
plus a corresponding section
in the appcompat-v7 chapter on the Toolbar backport

I have also added a new chapter on the Design Support library and its alternatives
for Material Design elements: FABs, snackbars, and TabLayout. Other
elements of the Design Support library will be added to this chapter
in future book updates.

The book has had two chapters devoted to the camera for a while:
how to use third-party code to work with the camera and how to use
the android.hardware.Camera API. I have updated those chapters with
an eye towards the Android 5.0+ android.hardware.camera2 API.

I split the original chapter on SharedPreferences into two, adding
an advanced preferences chapter to the trails. A lot of additional material
was added to these chapters, including dependent preferences, nested
preference screens, etc.

I added a sample of using OkHttp���s native API, which for many people
will be an easier alternative to HttpUrlConnection as an escape route
from the deprecated-and-removed HttpClient API.

Various other chapters were updated, such as the chapter on SQLCipher,
along with the typical roster of errata fixes.

Now, here are the other changes:

The chapters on AlarmManager and NotificationManager were moved
into the trails. Courtesy of Google���s ���war on background processing���,
any sort of background operation is definitely an advanced topic.

Similarly, I removed what had been Tutorial #17 and Tutorial #18
from the EmPubLite series, as they covered AlarmManager and
NotificationManager. The former Tutorial #19 is the new
Tutorial #17.

I have removed the Eclipse instructions from the tutorials, as the
first pulse in a gradual de-Eclipse-ification of the book.

For some reason, changebars are showing up on a lot of the code listings,
despite the fact that I did not change the code for those samples. I
apologize for the additional noise in the change reporting.

Version 6.9 should be released in the latter half of October 2015, barring
something huge happening in the world of Android requiring a faster
book update.