Ask HN: Recommended reading for beginning Android development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Recommended reading for beginning Android development?

6 pointsnorova8 comments

Hello. I'm starting to delve into Android development and was just wondering if anyone has any book, site, blog, etc. recommendations that they'd be able to share. I've read through the Google Android guide a bit but frankly the thing is formatted in such a way that I just can't focus when working through it, so I'm looking to alternatives.

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I used this book to get me started: http://www.amazon.com/Android-Developers-Cookbook-Building-A...

Enough examples to get you on your way to building something interesting. I did have to refer to Google's docs when trying to use newer features or to get a more technical grasp on what certain things did.

I have used this book and it has helped a lot http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Android-Application-Devel...

I heard good things about this http://commonsware.com/ so you might want to check it out.

Try some youtube tutorials, though there aren't too many, and some can't be easily found with a search.

Sites: http://anddev.org/ http://www.androidsnippets.com/ http://p-xr.com/

I've not found a book I thought was better than the Google docs, sad to say.

Biggest issue I had was grokking the idea of intents and such; the terminology is not well explained.

Overall I got the most out of looking at sample code. I've seen several suggestions to do the Google tutorials as well.

I do enjoy the content in the Google docs, I just can't focus while reading through it. If I need to read something I usually do better by having a hard copy of it. :(

I'm exactly the same way.

Yeah, I typically try to find some example code of what I want to do, hack on it, and go to the docs to see what in the world is going on.

A lot of the resources for Android development are a bit outdated right now: probably none of them make any use of the new fragment functionality which is a must for building a functional app for phones and tablets.

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