Android has been out for a while now. Although I had heard about Android from various corners a long ago, I didn’t take an interest to learn it initially. Two months ago, on accident by purpose, as part of college mini project I decided to develop an application for Android. Now having jumped into the bandwagon, I feel I should have done the same earlier, but better late than never.
Android is an operating system and software stack for mobile devices and uses a modified version of the Linux Kernel. Click here to read more. A big plus for Android is, coding is done in Java which is one of the most popular programming languages out. Having a good knowledge of Java simplified things for me greatly. If you are new to Java this online tutorial can get you started.
Pros of Developing for Android
- No restrictions on applications that can be published.
- Get to code in Java which is widely known.
- Can develop on any platform (Mac/Windows/Linux).
- Great Android devices coming out this year.
- Easy to do XML way of laying out views.
- SDK can be integrated with Eclipse IDE.
- Huge and vibrant developer community.
When I started learning Android, I thought of doing it from a book rather than learning online. But I quickly gave up the idea, after trying 2 books which were ought to be best out there and they weren’t comprehensive enough on many features of Android.
The Android structure of views, intents and activities seems intimidating at first sight. But once you start developing an application it becomes definitely shreds that appearance. The best place to get started for developing in Android is unarguably developer.android.com
The Developer’s Guide there explores the concepts behind Android, the framework for constructing an application, and the tools for developing, testing, and publishing software for the platform.
As the tradition goes, the way to start is by saying ‘Hello World’.
‘Hello Views’ gives an introduction of various views and widgets in Android.
Notepad Tutorial This tutorial on developing an Android application gets your feet wet to the framework.
API Demos illustrate the use of various Android APIs.
Common Tasks and How to Do Them in Android
Google group for Android Developers is the best place to discuss Android Dev.
stackoverflow has over 8000 questions tagged Android and you can get answers for most of the questions pertaining to Android Development here.
Android Snippets is where you can share useful snippets of source code.
You can browse the source code for Android here.
The videos from recently concluded Google I/O is worth checking out too.
There are lots of other resources waiting to be exploited all over the Internet for an Android developer. Just get your keywords right.
If you prefer learning from a book, Beginning Android by Mark Murphy would be my recommendation.
From the next post onwards, I will post some tutorials based on Application Development in Android.
The Road I took 
Saw your stackoverflow profile just now – I am sure that you are now completely “hooked” to Android and Free Software. Keep up the good work!
After the project work is over, I can give some suggestions as to how you can take your enthusiasm for Android and Free Software to the “Next Level”.
One more suggestion – try to answer questions on stackoverflow, and try to update your blog once a week with new technical content. Keep any new code you write on a github repo. These things can be immensely helpful once you start your search for a career ….
nice stuff ! if you can put a category sidebar widget from wordpress then it will be more help to navigate..