Dependency management is one of the areas where Gradle really shines. In the best case scenario, all you need to do is add one line to your build file, and Gradle will download the dependency from a remote repository and make sure its classes are available to your project. Gradle even goes a step further. In case a dependency for your project has dependencies of its own, Gradle will resolve those, and take care of everything. These dependencies of dependencies are called transitive dependencies.

This chapter introduces the concepts of dependency management, and explains the multiple ways of adding dependencies to Android projects. These are the main topics we will be talking about: