Book update plans

[Mark Murphy]

For a while, I had been holding onto faint hopes that the Nexus One
wasn't real, or wasn't going to have the as-yet-unreleased Android 2.1.

The good(?) news is: my hopes appear dashed, and the Nexus One will see
the light of day next week.

The bad news is: my hopes appear dashed, and we'll have yet ANOTHER
Android release upon us. If the Nexus One is being debuted on Tuesday,
and it truly has 2.1, my guess is that we'll see an SDK release Monday.
I can't imagine they'll release one tomorrow or Friday, and it's a
trifle late to do so today.

Regardless, I am gearing up for another round of updates to the books,
to make sure the examples work on 2.1, plus add a smattering of coverage
of truly new material. So, I am holding off publishing an update to
_Android Programming Tutorials_, as I had been planning on doing
tomorrow. Instead, all three books will get attention in January for
2.1, with _Android Programming Tutorials_ coming out mid-month.

Also, I hope to cram in a bit more work on the EPUB stuff and get the
books published in that format with their next updates.

--
Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy)
http://commonsware.com | http://twitter.com/commonsguy

Android Consulting/App Development: http://commonsware.com/consulting

[Ted Chien]

Nexus One is real, that's for sure. ;)

From my experience, if Google is going to release a new version for
something, the new API / SDK will be released right at the time of the press
meeting, also the purchase page for the device. So I think the new Android
2.1 SDK will be released at 10am, Jan. 5th, but I think it's just a little
time difference to you, Murphy.

Keep up the good work, you have all my support. :)

Regards,
Ted
http://www.linkedin.com/in/htchien

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[oregonduckman]

If you are interested in the idea, it would be very helpful if you published a roadmap the shows the relationship of the subjects covered in the tutorials with more in-depth coverage that is given to the tutorial elements in your other two books. For example, you make reference to the Model Class in the very 1st chapter of the tutorial book and it would be helpful to have a roadmap entry that shows where in your other two books the Android framework is explained in detail (ideally there would be a link in the pdf that would take the reader to entry). Or in tutorial 5 when you talk about lists and it would be helpful to have a link to chapter 8 in The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development that explains how lists work in the Android framework.

[Mark Murphy]

oregonduckman wrote:
> If you are interested in the idea, it would be very helpful if you
> published a roadmap the shows the relationship of the subjects covered
> in the tutorials with more in-depth coverage that is given to the
> tutorial elements in your other two books.

One problem: not everybody buys the subscription. These books are also
available in print (two from CommonsWare, one from Apress). I guarantee
that I'll get *killed* in Amazon reviews if I'm constantly pointing
people to a book they don't own. I do enough of that in the Advanced
Android book, pointing to the original book.

I'll need to ponder for a while and see if I can work out a system that
covers these issues and isn't too painful for me as
author/publisher/janitor.

--
Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy)
http://commonsware.com | http://twitter.com/commonsguy

Android Training in US: 22-26 February 2010: http://onlc.com

[Kevin Duffey]

Hey Mark,

Is there a way to get the updated parts highlighted.. not sure if that is even possible with PDF, but I'd love to see the changes you applied compared to the current version I have so I can just read those parts and not have to scan the whole doc and try to figure out what's different.

I hope my Moto Droid is "as good" as the new google phone dang it. lol. Going to be a bit peeved if I could have waited two more months for a better phone. It would have been nice to know that this phone was coming out a few months ago.

[Ry Jones]

The droid remains the best android phone on Verizon.

---

From: andj...@gmail.com

I hope my Moto Droid is "as good" as the new google phone dang it. lol. Going to be a bit peeved if I could have waited two more months for a better phone. It would have been nice to know that this phone was coming out a few months ago.

---

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[Mark Murphy]

> Is there a way to get the updated parts highlighted.. not sure if that is
> even possible with PDF, but I'd love to see the changes you applied
> compared
> to the current version I have so I can just read those parts and not have
> to
> scan the whole doc and try to figure out what's different.

Yeah, you're not the first person to ask for that. It's not totally out of
the question.

Anybody out there know of a good XML diff utility?

I write the books in a quasi-DocBook markup language, so if I can find an
XML diff utility that gives me output I can parse, I can probably add
changebars or something to the PDFs, and some sort of icon for other
formats.

--
Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy)
http://commonsware.com

Android App Developer Books: http://commonsware.com/books.html

[Ted Chien]

Hi Mark,

Maybe you can try Araxis Merge, it works great for me.

Araxis Merge:
Win: http://www.araxis.com/merge/
Mac: http://www.araxis.com/merge_mac/

Regards,
Ted Chien
http://www.linkedin.com/in/htchien

[Kevin Duffey]

http://free.editix.com/features.html

Shows something about DocBook in there.. not sure how well that will work tho. I've primarily used Eclipse for all my diffs as it has a great diff engine. Not sure tho how you would be able to save the diffs. I was thinking how you can edit a file and others can edit it and you can keep tabs/history on the edits.. and some way saving that to PDF so that you can show/hide the different changes over time. I don't know enough about the book format and how it works with edits tho.

[yeradis]

Winmerge works Great,Araxis too

HAPPY NEW YEAR PEOPLE

Pd: Enviado desde dispositivo móvil Android

El 05/01/2010 01:50, "Mark Murphy" <mmu...@commonsware.com> escribió:

> Is there a way to get the updated parts highlighted.. not sure if that is > even possible with PDF...

Yeah, you're not the first person to ask for that. It's not totally out of
the question.

Anybody out there know of a good XML diff utility?

I write the books in a quasi-DocBook markup language, so if I can find an
XML diff utility that gives me output I can parse, I can probably add
changebars or something to the PDFs, and some sort of icon for other
formats.

--

Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy) http://commonsware.com

Android App Developer Books: http://commonsware.com/books.html

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[Mark Murphy]

> Winmerge works Great,Araxis too

My apologies to all -- I should have been more explicit about the
requirements.

The diff'd output either has to be dumped as some sort of file, or
available via an API (and then only if it will run on Linux). The tools
you listed are visual diff utilities, which are nice and all, but won't do
me much good in this case.

I need to be able to integrate the diff logic into my book publishing
process. The act of creating an edition of a CommonsWare book is much like
compiling a program -- I have build scripts, source code (DocBook, images,
etc.), and targets (PDF, Kindle, and in-progress EPUB). Effectively,
processing the diffs needs to be something I can add to the build scripts
and my "compilers" (the custom stuff that turns DocBook into PDF, etc.).

Thanks for the input!