Murphy M.L. The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development. Version 7.5

CommonsWare, 2016. — 3859 p. — ISBN: 0981678009, 9780981678009As you may have noticed, this is a rather large book. To make the equivalent of ~3,500+ pages of material manageable, the chapters are divided into the core chapters and a series of trails.
The core chapters represent many key concepts that Android developers need to understand in order to build an app. While an occasional “nice to have” topic will drift into the core — to help illustrate a point, for example — the core chapters generally are fairly essential.
The core chapters are designed to be read in sequence and will interleave both traditional technical book prose with tutorial chapters, to give you hands-on experience with the concepts being discussed. Most of the tutorials can be skipped, though the first two — covering setting up your SDK environment and creating a project – everybody should read.
The bulk of the chapters are divided into trails, covering some particular general topic, from data storage to advanced UI effects to performance measurement and tuning. Each trail will have several chapters. However, those chapters, and the trails themselves, are not necessarily designed to be read in any order. Each chapter in the trails will point out prerequisite chapters or concepts that you will want to have covered in advance. Hence, these chapters are mostly reference material, for when you specifically want to learn something about a specific topic.
The core chapters will link to chapters in the trails, to show you where you can find material related to the chapter you just read. So between the book’s table of contents, this preface, the search tool in your digital book reader, and the crosschapter links, you should have plenty of ways of finding the material you want to read.
You are welcome to read the entire book front-to-back if you wish. The trails will appear after the core chapters. Those trails will be in a reasonably logical order, though you may have to hop around a bit to cover all of the prerequisites.