Android Application Development Cookbook: 93 Recipes for Building Winning Apps

Chapter 9: Accessing the Hardware covers how to access the many hardware features from your 
Android application. It includes recipes demonstrating how to take pictures using the built-in cam-
era, how to turn GPS on/off, as well as how to enable the device’s flashlight. 
Chapter 10: Persisting Data covers several methods for persisting your data, including internal stor-
age, external storage, a database, and more. 
Chapter 11: Deploying your Android Applications covers the different ways to deploy your Android 
applications, such as through an SD card, a web server, or e-mail.
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introduction
hoW this booK is struCtureD
Chapters in this book are divided into main topics, with each chapter containing multiple “recipes” 
that address specific subtopics in more detail. Instead of adopting the step-by-step approach of 
creating a project and then explaining how the code works, this books demonstrates the key ingre-
dients of each recipe — the key points you need to understand in order to meet a requirement or 
solve a problem (or complete a common task) in Android programming. Each recipe covers the core 
concepts you need to understand, without any unnecessary code that can complicate an example. 
Using this approach, it would be easiest for you to copy-and-paste the code into your own project 
and then enhance it for your own purpose. This, in my opinion, is the best way to learn Android 
programming. 
To that end, every chapter has a very defined structure. Each recipe is numbered and has a title. The 
recipe begins with a list of components needed to successfully complete the solution, like so:
 reCiPe 
0.0 
the reCiPe requireMents
Android Versions
Each recipe uses APIs from the Android SDK. The Android Versions section 
states the version (level number) from which the APIs are from. For example, 
you might see “Level 1 and above.” This indicates that the APIs used in this 
recipe are available from Android level 1 (i.e., version 1.0) and above. 
permissions
The Permissions section shows the permissions that you need to add into 
your application, specifically the 
AndroidManifest.xml
file, in order to use 
the APIs described in the recipe. Be sure to add the permission; forgetting to 
do so will usually cause the application to crash during run time.