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Key benefits

Learn how to use Android's high-level concurrency constructs to keep your applications smooth and responsive

Leverage the full power of multi-core mobile CPUs to get more work done in less time

From quick calculations to scheduled downloads, each chapter explains the available mechanisms of asynchronous programming in detail

Description

With more than a million apps available from Google Play, it is more important than ever to build apps that stand out from the crowd. To be successful, apps must react quickly to user input, deliver results in a flash, and sync data in the background. The key to this is understanding the right way to implement asynchronous operations that work with the platform, instead of against it. Asynchronous Android is a practical book that guides you through the concurrency constructs provided by the Android platform, illustrating the applications, benefits, and pitfalls of each.Learn to use AsyncTask correctly to perform operations in the background, keeping user-interfaces running smoothly while avoiding treacherous memory leaks. Discover Handler, HandlerThread and Looper, the related and fundamental building blocks of asynchronous programming in Android. Escape from the constraints of the Activity lifecycle to load and cache data efficiently across your entire application with the Loader framework. Keep your data fresh with scheduled tasks, and understand how Services let your application continue to run in the background, even when the user is busy with something else.Asynchronous Android will help you to build well-behaved apps with smooth, responsive user-interfaces that delight users with speedy results and data that's always fresh, and keep the system happy and the battery charged by playing by the rules.

What you will learn

Understand Android s process model and its implications on your applications

Exercise multithreading to build well-behaved Android applications that work with the platform

Apply and control concurrency to deliver results quickly and keep your applications responsive to user input

Discover Android-specific constructs that make asynchronous programming easy and efficient

Learn how to apply Android s concurrency constructs to build smooth and responsive applications

What do you get with eBook?

Instant access to your Digital eBook purchase

Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

Frequently bought together

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Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments

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Total € 102.97

Customer reviews

Rating distribution

4.8

(4 Ratings)

5 star 75%

4 star 25%

3 star 0%

2 star 0%

1 star 0%

Brett Sep 28, 2014

This is the best book to learn about the android framework's async features. There are other broader books on android that will give a chapter or two to the various pieces of the framework that are provided to help you run tasks asynchronously but they always seem to leave you wanting and wandering Google for a little more information. The author gives a thorough introduction to each of the tools provided by android to help its developers run tasks in parallel.I would recommend reading the entire book but it is organized nicely and each component gets its own chapter. If you are simply dealing with asynctasks and life cycle issues related to asynctasks you can open this book to that chapter and be happily on your way.Overall because of the importance that android places on not blocking an application's main thread means that every android developer should read this book to get the best performance and stability from their apps.

Amazon Verified review

Philip Arad Apr 07, 2014

With more than a million apps available from Google Play, Android has quickly become one of the most popular mobile operating system in use. Nowadays it is more important than ever to build apps that react quickly to user input, deliver results in a flash, and sync data in the background. Among the many things that contribute to a great user experience, responsiveness is the most important. Before making your app available to your users you must eliminate pauses and glitches while scrolling content, remove user interfaces that freeze while loading data from storage, add progress updates to let us know what's happening, and so on. In order to accomplish this task you must understand how to implement asynchronous operations that work with the Android platformTo address this problem efficiently, I recommend reading the book 'Asynchronous Android' from 'Packt Publishing' (see [...] )'Asynchronous Android' is a practical book that guides you through the concurrency constructs provided by the Android platform, illustrating the applications, benefits, and pitfalls of each.Reading the book, you will learn to use AsyncTask correctly to perform operations in the background, keeping user-interfaces running smoothly while avoiding treacherous memory leaks. Discover Handler, HandlerThread and Looper, the related and fundamental building blocks of asynchronous programming in Android. Escape from the constraints of the Activity lifecycle to load and cache data efficiently across your entire application with the Loader framework. Keep your data fresh with scheduled tasks, and understand how Services let your application continue to run in the background, even when the user is busy with something else.Asynchronous Android will help you to build well-behaved apps with smooth, responsive user-interfaces that delight users with speedy results and data that’s always fresh, and keep the system happy and the battery charged by playing by the rules.

Amazon Verified review

Liang Ma Sep 14, 2014

Very concise, but informative and helpful. Well worth the money. Sincerely recommend this great book to all Android developers.

Amazon Verified review

R. Williams Mar 24, 2014

Give this book a little bit of credit for doing a decent job of covering the waterfront which is kind of vast. You can figure most of the same things out reading the documentation, but this is a good single source, for example, to figure out if you want to use Handlers or AsyncTasks, etc. Frankly, this is one of the best things books can provide when their topic is as wide ranging as an operating system, and the Android docs do not do this very well. The section on Services is really pretty good: there is discussion of IntentService vs. extending Service itself, and the rationale for doing services (which is actually quite broad).The negatives in this book is that the material is pretty thin. For instance, there is no in depth discussion of things like the looper. There is no discussion at all about testing. It all kind of has the feel of just 'if you're looking for x, go to door y.' Also, there are a few sections of the book that are completely absurd like the one where the author uses a file download as an example of something that ought be implemented as a service, then in the chapter summary he calls it the best example of a service. On earth? Huh??Just barely made 4 and that's because of the success in providing comparative summaries that the documentation lacks.

Amazon Verified review

Asynchronous Android: As an Android developer you know you're in a competitive marketplace. This book can give you the edge by guiding you through the concurrency constructs and proper use of AsyncTask to create smooth user interfaces.

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