Quick access to Android for a third person

Question

Recently I was asked if I could help someone to get quick-started to android programming.

What would you suggest to tell this person? Would you explain everything by hand or just refer to external links? Which ressources would you recommend? This whole issue should not take too much time...assuming 2-3 hours

Once my access to this issue was "Professional android application development". Java basics are already preconditioned, so there's no need to explain ANYTHING.

For avoiding any misconceptions: This shall be just a quick start, no reference or something like this, so I just need some keywords and a hint how deeply go through it.

Answer 1

In my opinion, everything you really need is here: http://developer.android.com/index.html

All the downloads are easily accessible, the API reference is there, and the Dev guide is pretty well done.

This page has a getting started "Hello World" type tutorial that should work for your quick start: http://developer.android.com/guide/tutorials/hello-world.html

As far as your 2-3 hours goes. I would walk them through the hello world tutorial first as it gives a quick and dirty overview of the most important basics such as getting a project created and a virtual device up and running to test with. It will also start getting into installing and debugging.

That shouldn't take up all of your time so you may want to go into some basics of building a UI and concepts like Activities and Intents. Pointing out the API reference would be great at this point as well. I suspect that most of that 2-3 hours would be up if you get into any sort of detail on these.

Answer 2

Well you already mentioned a book in your question, so I would like to throw out http://commonsware.com/Android/ .

I've been working on an Android project for school, and I still have A LOT to learn, I dont think you can cover much in 2-3 hours. But anyway, with the above book, you can find an example that is similar to what your trying to accomplish(or go over), then look through the source code and what-not.

Aside from the Android Dev. website, the $40 collection of ebooks is the single best resource I have found to date other than Google searched or examples specific to my project.

Sorry if this doesnt really help your cause, but I figured it was worth pointing out.