Versions between a major edition and the next release candidate (e.g., 1.1,
1.2) will contain bug fixes plus new material. Each of these editions should
also be complete, in that you will not see any "TBD" (to be done) markers
or the like. However, these editions may have bugs, and so bug reports are
eligible for the bounty program, as with release candidates and major
releases.
A book usually will progress fairly rapidly through the pre-release editions
to the first release candidate and Version 1.0 – often times, only a few
months. Depending on the book's scope, it may go through another cycle of
significant improvement (versions 1.1 through 2.0), though this may take
several months to a year or more. Eventually, though, the book will go into
more of a "maintenance mode", only getting updates to fix bugs and deal
with major ecosystem events – for example, a new release of the Android
SDK will necessitate an update to all Android books.
Roster of Tutorials
Here is what you can expect in going through the tutorials in this book:
- We start off with a simple throwaway project, just to make sure you
have the development tools all set up properly. - We then begin creating LunchList, an application to track
restaurants where you might wish to go for lunch. In this tutorial,
we set up a simple form to collect basic information about a
restaurant, such as a name and address.- We expand the form to add radio buttons for the type of restaurant
(e.g., takeout).
- Instead of tracking just a single restaurant, we add support for a list
of restaurants – but each restaurant shows up in the list only
showing its name.- We extend the list to show the name and address of each restaurant,
plus an icon for the restaurant type. - To give us more room, we split the UI into two tabs, one for the list
of restaurants, and one for the detail form for a restaurant.
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