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.
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.