Preface

Suppose someone decided fingernails scraping on a blackboard was music. Suppose everyone jumped on this bandwagon and pretty soon the only music you could listen to anywhere was the sound of fingernails on a blackboard. This is exactly how I feel about the unaccountably popular development environment for Android apps (which shall not be named in this book).

This book is written for the alternate universe in which the environment not to be named was never invented and never touted in the 47,621 other Android development books out there. This book is written for the command line, and makefiles, and tools that are useful. This book is not for “helpful” tools that are constantly inserting themselves between you and your source code and telling you what to do when you know you don't want to do that.

My eventual objective is to develop a wonderful user interface for my AardRemote gadget.

The book will mostly be in the form of a tour guide to the web pages at http://developer.android.com/, presenting the information extracted from them in the order I found useful on my way to my ultimate app.

No doubt there will be some side trips to http://stackoverflow.com/ as well, the primary place to get Android questions answered (and find answers that have already been given).

We shall see if I can actually learn Android programming without the environment not to be named and write this book about it (and if anyone will read it).

Tom Horsley

June 12, 2012
Delray Beach, Florida