// the find
commonsguy/cw-advandroid
Source Code to _The Busy Coder's Guide To Advanced Android Development_
Source code companion to Mark Murphy's 'Busy Coder's Guide to Advanced Android Development' book, covering topics like AIDL remote services, app widgets, animations, and broadcast receivers. This is a teaching repo, not a library — each subdirectory is a standalone sample project illustrating one concept from the book. The book itself has been retired in favor of the omnibus edition.
The samples are genuinely self-contained — each project folder has its own manifest, build files, and source, so you can drop into any single example without untangling a monorepo. The AIDL remote service examples (AdvServices/) are a good progression: bound, unbound, with and without result callbacks. Topics like AppWidget with RemoteViewsFactory and LocalBroadcastManager reflect patterns that were non-obvious when this was written.
The build system is Ant, which Android tooling dropped a decade ago — none of these projects will load cleanly into a modern Android Studio without manual migration to Gradle. The Java is pre-Kotlin, pre-Jetpack, and pre-AndroidX, so the patterns shown (e.g., raw Handler/Looper threading, ActionBar vs Toolbar) are not how you'd write anything today. The repo is explicitly retired with a pointer to the omnibus edition, meaning there's no path forward here if you hit a gap. Stars and forks are inflated by age — this was the reference for a popular book series, not evidence of ongoing relevance.