INFORMATION

Android beginner tutorial Part 1 Introduction

This is the introduction part of the Android development tutorial series.

So far Ive written only Actionscript 3 tutorials for this blog. I believe it is time to move on to another technology, which Ive chosen to be Android. The language used here isnt AS3, its Java - a language Im sure youve heard of. The syntax is similar to Actionscript, but some things are different. The Android SDK itself is pretty complex too. It is not going to be easy to learn Android development, but, in my opinion, its definitely worth it.

Since this used to be an AS3 blog, I am going to assume that my readers are people with some knowledge of AS3 and are beginners to Android SDK like me. The official Android website offers a series of tutorial to get developers started, however it is aimed at Java programmers.

For the first few tutorials, I am going to basically show you how to do the same thing they show at their official website, but explaining every detail that would be unclear to people with no previous experience with Java, for example, Ill explain the differencies in syntax between AS3 and Java as we write code.

I will try to explain everything the way that a person with some previous AS3 experience would understand. This means when we encounter unusual and new techniques or syntax features, Ill compare them with AS3, make analogies and give examples of how the same functionality could be achieved with AS3. I believe this will be a good learning experience for both you, my readers, and myself too.

All the tools used in Android development are free. It is also very good if you have an android device you can debug the applications on. The Eclipse IDE, which we will be using, together with Android SDK provide virtual device emulators too, which will show us how the application looks on a phone or a tablet by emulating the device. This will especially be useful when we want to see how our application looks on devices with different screen sizes.

First thing we need to do is head to the android developer website and download the Android SDK together with Eclipse IDE. Click here to do that now.

Download the bundle, unpack the ZIP file somewhere (the IDE has no installer, just a standalone exe), and run the eclipse.exe located in eclipse folder. Theres the IDE with all the Android SDK tools already built-in!

Well start writing our first Hello World application in the next tutorial.

Thanks for reading!