Question

I recently began learning how to write apps for Android. Before resorting to a tutorial series, I tried going to the Android API and learning through that. The problem was that it’s pretty big, and there are a lot of new methods and objects. One method returns an object that’s totally new to me, so I go to that class, and that has other methods that return other objects, and it extends classes that are also new….it’s just a huge system.
But somebody must have figured out how to program for Android OS before the tutorials (say, the guy who ends up making the tutorials later on). So how do people learn and understand where to begin/how to program in something so large and complex as Android? I would suspect they use the API, but how do you make sense of all of it?
I guess a better question is, what are some good ways to look at a new API, and any tips on how to understand it?

Answer 1

First when you want to use a new API – You need to ask this question

1. Do you want to learn the basics of the API?
2. Do you have a specific task to complete with the API?

Do you want to learn the basics of the API?

Learning the basics of the API starts from understanding the framework and what architectural decisions are made. How to kick start development. Basically it’s not completely possible to learn a Framework without a Developer guide -An API is something that provides documentations for methods and classes. To take a bird-eye view you have to learn through the Developer Guide.

Do you have a specific task to complete with the API?

Suppose you want to create a form that gets some data and insert that data to a SQLITE database. You can start that by working on what you already know. As in database connections, user interfaces.

And Android or iOS is not like a traditional API – You have to know how to run, develop, design, and test applications. If it’s a simple API like Apache Commons Lang you can learn it easily by the API documentation. Hope this helps.