Books about Androids from Amazon.com

These bestselling excerpts from Stephen Windwalker's forthcoming book are a Kindle owner's dream, now over 25,000 words in length and newly packed with great tips such as Using Google Reader to Read Blogs on the Kindle, How to Use the Kindle for Email, Optimizing Your Use of Kindle Search, Projecting a Kindle Future, Writing and Note Taking on Your Kindle, Using "Locations" to Figure Out How Close You Are to the End of a Kindle Edition, Making the Most of Your Kindle Connections Overseas or in a Sprint Wireless Dead Zone, Using the Kindle as a Travel Guide, Using the Kindle to Translate Foreign or Technical Words and Phrases, Refresh Revised Content At No Charge, Kindle Accessories, and Care and Feeding of Your Kindle Battery. Readers may update this content at any time through Amazon's "Your Media Library" feature. The forthcoming book will be available **at no additional charge** as an upgrade to readers who have already purchased these excerpts when published in its entirety later in 2008..
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Sometime in the twenty-third century, humanity went extinct—leaving only androids behind. Freya Nakamichi 47 is a femmebot, one of the last of her kind still functioning With no humans left to pay for the pleasures she provides, she agrees to transport a mysterious package from Mercury to Mars. Unfortunately for Freya, she has just made herself a moving target for some very powerful, very determined humanoids who will stop at nothing to possess the contents of the package..
Price: $12.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world."
--John Brunner
THE INSPIRATION FOR BLADERUNNER . .
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968. Grim and foreboding, even today it is a masterpiece ahead of its time.
By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. . .
They even built humans.
Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.
Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.
"[Dick] sees all the sparkling and terrifying possibilities. . . that other authors shy away from."
--Paul Williams
Rolling Stone.
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Known in his lifetime primarily to readers of science fiction, Philip K. Dick (1928-82) is now seen as a uniquely visionary figure, a writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethem's words, "wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one that makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish him." Posing the questions "What is human?" and "What is real?" in a multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced works-fantastic and weird yet developed with precise logic, marked by wild humor and soaring flights of religious speculation-that are startlingly prescient imaginative responses to 21st-century quandaries.

This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick's most original novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award, describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones. The dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic future, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents and cryogenically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory "half-life," pursues Dick's theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions. As with most of Dick's novels, no plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising texture of these astonishing books..
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that most people think they remember and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner took a lot from it, and threw a lot away. Wonderful in itself, the film is a flash thriller, whereas Dick's novel is a sober meditation As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids who have returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially strapped municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break.

The genetically warped "chickenhead" John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this book asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk.
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Master the Android mobile development platform

Build compelling Java-based mobile applications using the Android SDK and the Eclipse open-source software development platform. Android: A Programmer's Guide shows you, step-by-step, how to download and set up all of the necessary tools, build and tune dynamic Android programs, and debug your results. Discover how to provide web and chat functions, interact with the phone dialer and GPS devices, and access the latest Google services. You'll also learn how to create custom Content Providers and database-enable your applications using SQLite.

• Install and configure Java, Eclipse, and Android plugin
• Create Android projects from the Eclipse UI or command line
• Integrate web content, images, galleries, and sounds
• Deploy menus, progress bars, and auto-complete functions
• Trigger actions using Android Intents, Filters, and Receivers
• Implement GPS, Google Maps, Google Earth, and GTalk
• Build interactive SQLite databases, calendars, and notepads
• Test applications using the Android Emulator and Debug Bridge

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Crossover is the first novel in a series which follows the adventures of Cassandra Kresnov, an artificial person, or android, created by the League, one side of an interstellar war against the more powerful, conservative Federation. Cassandra is an experimental design—more intelligent, more creative, and far more dangerous than any that have preceded her. But with her intellect come questions, and a moral awakening. She deserts the League and heads incognito into the space of her former enemy, the Federation, in search of a new life. Her chosen world is Callay, and its enormous, decadent capital metropolis of Tanusha, where the concerns of the war are literally and figuratively so many light years away. But the war between the League and the Federation was ideological as much as political, with much of that ideological dispute regarding the very existence of artificial sentience and the rules that govern its creation. Cassandra discovers that even in Tanusha, the powerful entities of this bloody conflict have wound their tentacles. Many in the League and the Federation have cause to want her dead, and Cassandra's history, inevitably, catches up with her. Cassandra finds herself at the mercy of a society whose values preclude her own right even to exist. But her presence in Tanusha reveals other fault lines, and when Federal agents attempt to assassinate the Callayan president, she finds herself thrust into the service of her former enemies, using her lethal skills to attempt to protect her former enemies from forces beyond their ability to control. As she struggles for her place and survival in a new world, Cassandra must forge new friendships with old enemies, while attempting to confront the most disturbing and deadly realities of her own existence..
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Android Essentials is a no–frills, no–nonsense, code–centric run through the guts of application development on Google’s Mobile OS. This book uses the development of a sample application to work through topics, focusing on giving developers the essential tools and examples required to make viable commercial applications work. Covering the entirety of the Android catalog in less than 150 pages is simply impossible. Instead, this book focuses on just four main topics: the application life cycle and OS integration, user interface, location–based services, and networking.

• Thorough, complete, and useful work on the nuts and bolts of applicatio development in Android
• Example driven and practically minded
• A tool for hobbyists and professionals who want to create production–quality applications

What you’ll learn

• Understand how an Android application functions and communicates with the handset that hosts it.
• Comprehend the complexities of timers, services, and multimedia playback.
• Create and display a rich mix of custom–rendered screens and tailored Android widgets.
• Understand how location–based services are becoming more and more important in the mobile world.
• See how to use Google’s powerful Map tool.
• Explore the intricacies of network connectivity in the mobile world.

Who is this book for

This book is for professional software engineers looking to move their ideas and applications into the mobile space with Android. The author assumes the reader has a passable understanding of Java. They should be able to write classes and handle basic inheritance structures. This book also targets hobbyist developers looking to negotiate the complex minefield of mobile software.

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