Capstone Courseware and Compendium EC proudly releases a full sweep of updates to its popular Android curriculum, for Android 4.2, also known as "Jelly Bean." Introductory, intermediate, and accelerated courses all are fully updated and tested to work with the latest APIs and emulators.

Major new course features include:

• use of fragments as re-usable encapsulations of user-interface design and functionality -- including specialized fragment classes DialogFragment, PreferencesFragment, and ListFragment
• use of the action bar to organize menu items, and appropriate use of context menus and the contextual action bar, as well as the action bar's navigation mode
• expanded coverage of threading and appropriate use of the AsyncTask class
• Using the new notification builder in order to create user-visible broadcast notifications

The course now also exhibits best practices for multi-form design, using alternate layouts and other resources so that its case-study applications work well on smaller phones and larger tablets, and transition seamlessly between landscape and portrait orientation.

We've preserved the alignment of the original courses:

• 251. Introduction to Android Development (Version 4.2) - a one-week introduction focused on Android fundamentals, UI, and storage
• 252. Intermediate Android Development (Version 4.2) - a four-day intermediate course covering threading, networking, multimedia, maps, and more
• 255. Android Development (Version 4.2) - an accelerated one-week that pulls from both courses.

In other news, there is also a new one-day course on Android security that lines up nicely with the intermediate course for a full week. All four courses are available for immediate use.