Ask HN: Recommended reading for beginning Android development?

Toddward · on May 29, 2011

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.

danest · on May 27, 2011

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.

nextparadigms · on May 27, 2011

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/

jamesbritt · on May 27, 2011

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.

norova · on May 27, 2011

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. :(

Toddward · on May 29, 2011

I'm exactly the same way.

jamesbritt · on May 31, 2011

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.

veeti · on May 27, 2011

A lot of the resources for Android development are a bit outdated right now: probably none of them make any use of the new fragment functionality which is a must for building a functional app for phones and tablets.