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Over the last three years, Google’s Android operating system (OS) has gone from a virtually unknown
open source solution to the current mobile OS market leader among all mobile handsets, with over
one-half of the market share and still climbing. Android has even started to dominate the tablet OS
marketplace, and is also the foundation for the popular iTV OS known as GoogleTV as well as for
e-book e-readers from Sony, Amazon (Kindle), and Barnes and Noble (Nook). There seems to be no
end in sight for Android’s rocketing success, which is great news for the owners of this book.
I’ve heard a great many people say, “I have a really phenomenal idea for a smartphone and
tablet application! Can you program it for me!?” Rather than sit back and code all of these cool
applications for everyone, I thought it might be a smarter idea to write a book about how an absolute
beginner could code an Android application using open source tools that cost nothing to download
and that are free for commercial use, and then leverage that new found knowledge to reach their
dream of making their application idea a revenue-generating reality.
Thanks to open source tools and formats and Google’s Android development environment,
Oracle’s Java programming language, Linus Torvalds’ Linux operating system, the Eclipse code
editing software, and to this book of course, vaporizing a software product out of thin air and at no
production cost other than your PC and “sweat equity,” is now a complete reality. |