DONN FELKER

Lessons Learned From the Software Industry

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My Book Hits #1 on Nielsen Bookscan

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I’m totally floored right now. My book hit and stayed at #1 in sales in ALL OF PROGRAMMING BOOKS for last week on Nielsen BookScan. Maybe it will do it again! Hopefully it will! What does that mean? It means that my book was the best selling book in the Programming Books category, ranking higher sales above all .NET Dev books, iPhone Dev Books, Java Books, Ruby Books, Rails Books, etc, you name it. My book was #1 and is showing no signs of slowing down (in fact, exactly the opposite according to my publisher). Again, I’m totally floored and feel very honored that people like my book that much. If you bought my book – thank you very much. 🙂

As always, if you’re a reader and you have any questions or problems feel free to contact me. Just scan the QR Code to the right to get my contact info with a bar code scanner. I’d be glad to help you.

Android App Dev For Dummies: USB Driver Installation

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Recently Google Updated their SDK to Version 9 and along with it came some other changes.

One such change is the movement of the USB Driver installation location.

New USB Driver Install Location

On page 50, on Figure 2-25 of the Android Application Development For Dummies book I reference the USB driver to be inside of the Available Packages area of the Android SDK and AVD Manager. Unfortunately this has changed in the most recent version. The USB Driver is now located under Third Party Add-ons under Available Packages in the SDK and AVD Manager, as shown below. Select this item to install the USB Driver on Windows.

Dummies Book: SDK Path

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If you have a copy of my Android Application Development for Dummies book, then you might run into an issue with a recent update to the SDK. The recent SDK, moves the adb executable (Android Debug Bridge) and Eclipse will need to be updated in order to reflect the proper placement of the new ADT for Eclipse (which tells Eclipse where to find the adb executable).You might see this window (below) that says “Could not find /<path>/<to>/<android>/adb! Please check the Android Plugin’s preferences.”

To eliminate this problem, do the following. You will need to update the ADT Plugin in Eclipse. The process is very similar to the initial install of the plug in, but this time instead of installing it, you will update it through the menus built into Eclipse.

  • Update the SDK to the most recent version
  • Open Eclipse
  • Select  Help Check for Updates (as shown in the screen shot below)

You will see a dialog window with a bunch of random updates being checked. Once this completes you will see the following window.

Select Next, then Next again, then select the “I accept the terms of the license agreements” radio button and then select Finish.

During the process you will see a window that looks like this:

Select Ok to continue.

At the completion of the upgrade, you will see this window:

Select Yes to restart Eclipse.

Eclipse will restart and you should not receive the error above anymore. You can now build your Android projects.
Enjoy!

Already a Second Pressing of Android App Dev for Dummies

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Wow! That was fast!

My publisher (Wiley) recently contacted me and informed me that my book, Android Application Development for Dummies, is already having to be reprinted for a second run. That’s amazing considering the fact that the book has been out for less than a month! (Release Date: Dec 7th)

A big thank you goes out to all of the readers of the book. Thank you for picking up a copy. If you ever run into any issue with the book, please email me and I’ll help you through any problems you encounter.

Thanks again!

Android App Dev for Dummies & Motorola Droids

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Recently, a kind reader by the name of Lee emailed me about an issue he had with not being able to connect his device to the computer for debugging purposes. He followed all of the examples and notes in the book and still could not get it to work. So, if you cannot get your Motorola Droid phone to connect to Eclipse, follow these instructions:
Sorry for the additional bit of work, but thanks to Lee we have a quick solution.