My latest book, Gradle Recipes for Android, is now available as a “Rough Cut” at O’Reilly. You can get it at http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032656.do.
Rough cuts are preliminary versions of O’Reilly books, which are released while a book is still in progress, without special effort taken for formatting or anything else.
In this case, however, the rough cut is pretty close to the final version. Recipe books at O’Reilly are like their cookbooks, only shorter. My book has about 27 recipes, which are short discussions of how to do specific tasks, in this case involving the Gradle build tool with the Android plugin, used to build Android applications. The book also contains information about how to use the only officially supported IDE, Android Studio.
The O’Reilly authoring system supports Asciidoc, which is wonderful. I found it much, much easier to write my book using Asciidoc, commit it to their git repository, and then generate the resulting pdf afterwards. The book is available in Safari Books Online, too, which show it formatted for HTML. The results are very nice, and allow you to copy and paste code from the browser to your editor of choice. For the record, I wrote the book using the Atom editor from GitHub, which has a nice Asciidoc preview mode.
The book is basically finished. I’m doing some editing and considering adding a recipe or two. If you have any suggestions, however, please feel free to send them along. I hope to complete the book in the next week or so, so it will be available in print form just in time for the holidays. 🙂
I’ve also been doing a lot of video course recording for O’Reilly over the past few months. So far the courses available are:
- Learning Android
- Practical Android
- Gradle Fundamentals
- Groovy Programming Fundamentals
- Practical Groovy Programming
- Mastering Groovy Programming
- Gradle for Android
All the courses are available for sale, or on Safari. The last one (Gradle for Android) is similar to the book, but the book has more depth, a different approach, and lots of reference information. The book has appendices on Groovy and Gradle, while the video summarizes both topics.
I should mention in the midst of all this shameless self-promotion that there is also a Packt book called Gradle for Android by Kevin Pelgrims. Packt books vary wildly in quality, but Kevin’s book is excellent. In fact, it was so good, that (combined with the fact I’d already coincidently recorded a video course of the same name) I decided I needed to switch my book to the recipe style. His book is much more the traditional exposition, with chapters and depth. Mine is more the “here’s a problem, now here’s a solution” style. I think both books are complementary. At least I hope so.
On an unrelated note, I now have a revised home page, http://www.kousenit.com. It’s about time.
I hope you enjoy the book and/or video courses, or even just my new home page. As always, any errors or omissions are entirely my responsibility. I’m just happy to be making all this content available. Now I have to finish this weekend’s No Fluff, Just Stuff conference in Boston, travel to Raleigh for a Groovy course, and then get in line to see The Martian.
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