Lauren Darcey

Lauren Darcey is responsible for the technical leadership and direction of a small software company specializing in mobile technologies, including Android, Apple iOS, BlackBerry, Palm Pre, BREW, and J2ME and consulting services. With more than two decades of experience in professional software production, Lauren is a recognized authority in application architecture and the development of commercial-grade mobile applications. Lauren received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Lauren spends her free time traveling the world with her geeky mobile-minded husband and daughter. She is an avid nature photographer whose work has been published in books and newspapers around the world. In South Africa, she dove with 4-meter-long great white sharks and got stuck between a herd of rampaging hippopotami and an irritated bull elephant. She‘s been attacked by monkeys in Japan, gotten stuck in a ravine with two hungry lions in Kenya, gotten thirsty in Egypt, narrowly avoided a coup d‘état in Thailand, geocached her way through the Swiss Alps, drank her way through the beer halls of Germany, slept in the crumbling castles of Europe, and gotten her tongue stuck to an iceberg in Iceland (while being watched by a herd of suspicious wild reindeer).

Shane Conder has extensive development experience and has focused his attention on mobile and embedded development for the past decade. He has designed and developed many commercial applications for Android, Apple iOS, BREW, BlackBerry, J2ME, Palm, and Windows Mobile—some of which have been installed on millions of phones worldwide. Shane has written extensively about the mobile industry and evaluated mobile-development platforms on his tech blogs and is well known within the blogosphere. Shane received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California.

A self-admitted gadget freak, Shane always has the latest smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device. He can often be found fiddling with the latest technologies, such as cloud services and mobile platforms, and other exciting, state-of-the-art technologies that activate the creative part of his brain. He is a very hands-on geek dad. He also enjoys traveling the world with his geeky wife, even if she did make him dive with 4-meter-long great white sharks and almost get eaten by a lion in Kenya. He admits that he has to take at least two phones with him when backpacking—even though there is no coverage—and that he snickered and whipped out his Android phone to take a picture when Laurie got her tongue stuck to that iceberg in Iceland, and that he has learned that he should be writing his own bio.

The authors have also published several other Android books, including Android Wireless Application Development, Android Wireless Application Development Volume I: Android Essentials, Android Wireless Application Development Volume 2: Advanced Topics, Sams Teach Yourself Android Application Development, and the mini-book Introducing Android Development with Ice Cream Sandwich . Lauren and Shane have also published numerous articles on mobile-software development for magazines, technical journals, and online publishers of educational content.

You can find dozens of samples of their work in Linux User and Developer, Smart Developer magazine (Linux New Media), developer.com, Network World, Envato (MobileTuts+ and CodeCanyon), and InformIT, among others. They also publish articles of interest to their readers at their own Android website: http://androidbook.blogspot.com. You can find a full list of the authors’ publications at http://goo.gl/f0Vlj .