Hi,
I just started looking at the android framework and was wondering what was the best way going about getting good at it. I started with a text game and created a simple bubbleWrap game next. But am not sure if I'm going about it the right way now, so I thought I'd ask some of you more experienced Android people out here. Are there any courses online that would be beneficial? Any books that helped ya'll?
Thanks in advance!
Here I m listing some forums that may help you getting started with Android:
http://www.vogella.de/articles/Android/article.html . Besides getting started, it also teaches to build a hello world app, demonstrates how to build menus and work with preferences, a nice content provider example and how to make a file browser. At last it demonstrates how to deploy your app onto a real device.
http://marakana.com/forums/android/examples/ This is one of my best recommendations. Some very nice demo projects are hosted on the site.
http://smartandroidians.blogspot.com/ Nice tutorials by Nithin Warreir. The blog contains some code snippets that help during development of big projects. One can learn implementation of various tools of Android development easily here.
http://www.anddev.org/ Anddev forum is pretty famous for having a large number of online users everytime. For any query you can easily post a question in this forum. Wait for the help that comes in just a few minutes.
http://slideme.org/ Besides the Official Marketplace, this is another marketplace that hosts developer's applications. For registering as developer in the official marketplace, one needs to pay $25, here lies the advantage of joining SlideMe, it is free..!!
Also try two books for Android Application development: Android 2 Application Development
OReilly Android Application Development and Wrox Professional Android 2 Application Development
Hope that helps...
I started out reading Application Fundamentals to get the 10,000 foot view of the framework. From there I bought Pro Android 2 in order to quickly learn about various Android subjects. I don't necessarily need to know about all of these subjects now, but it helps to know about other options. For instance, I don't need to use Content Providers right now, but they are a useful topic to be aware of if my app's requirements head in that direction. After flipping through that book I took a look at some of the tutorials that related to my application.
I'm currently developing my application with great success, although I continually have to reference the Documentation. Answering questions on stackoverflow has also helped me quite a bit, because I often learn more about the framework in researching for responses.
Also, make an effort to read a Technical Article every day from Developer Resources. Most of the articles are easy to follow, and they often cover issues you may not consider (such as the article on Avoiding Memory Leaks).
I've just finished reading Beginning Android 2 and can recommend it over the Oreilly book, it is a lot more thorough and gives you virtually every topic you need to learn for Android development. The author is on stackoverflow as commonsware I believe too.
The best option is to get an O'Reilly Safari subscription, then you get a whole bookshelf of Android books for $20 a month.