Over the last few months I’ve been hard-at-work in the early hours of the mornings, and late into the evenings working on another book about Android. The book is titled Hands-On Android UI Development, and is currently available for pre-order as either a DRM-Free e-book, or a combination e-book and paperback.
Hands-On Android UI Development has been a massive work for me, as it covers everything from the very basics of building an Android application from templates, through to improving user experience by building advanced thread-trapeze based command classes to deal with events and background processing.
In each chapter I don’t just illustrate how to write the code for a requirement, but also discuss the theory and background for each pattern illustrated. This gives the reader a depth of knowledge. As a user-interface developer it’s important not just to be able to code a good user interface, it’s also important to understand what makes a user interface good, or better still: great. It’s equally important to be able to help in the design process, and also consider the effect your code will have on the user experience. I’ve included subjects such as:
- How to design different types of screens, from input / form screens to overview and dashboard
- How to leverage the Android Architecture Components (such as LiveData, and the Room API) to build reactive applications
- Using Data-Binding including several power-user-features of this amazing system
- How to model an event system for great perceived performance
- How to build more modular applications and reuse more of your Android codebase
- Various power-tools to use with the RecyclerView class and it’s ecosystem, including the last ViewHolder class you’ll ever need to write
- Creating custom animations, View classes, and layouts
If you’re interested, you can check out the code from the book at GitHub over here: https://github.com/lemnik/HandsOnAndroidUI. You can order the book directly from the publishers web site, or from Amazon.
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