Getting Started with Android Development | Hacker News Reader

Getting Started with Android Development

jeanhsu.com

96 pointsrazin8 comments

I believe it is extremely important to start coding as soon as possible, and do several iterations of "learn by reading" and "learn by doing".

The Notepad example in the official documentation is a very good Hello World v2: http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/notepad/ind.... Immediately after doing this one, I believe you have to start coding for that application you have in mind right away.

When you learn a bit more, you'll come back and maybe create a custom component instead of that copy-pasted layout piece of XML, or replace that ugly thread by an AsyncTask...

As for the article, I really like the selection of material.

I've found this link to be the best guide for Emacs users

http://gregorygrubbs.com/development/tips-on-android-develop...

If your new, Eclipse is great to get you jumpstarted; however, I find IntelliJ much faster and reliable then Eclipse. I started Android development with Eclipse and only found IntlliJ later, I have not looked back since.

This is probably the most important piece of advice I would give someone getting started. I run OS X and at least for me Eclipse was a constant source of pain. IntelliJ looks better, runs faster, is more stable, and has all of the important refactorings bound to shortcuts - something you have to do manually for most refactorings in Eclipse, which is a pain because of conflicts.

In my opinion, if you're a newbie just use IntelliJ.

Absolutely agree here. I've ran into some issues occasionally with IntelliJ when reading an Eclipse tutorial and translating Eclipse concepts into IntelliJ concepts (especially around libraries and unit testing), but otherwise, I find IntelliJ much better and would have preferred I had started there.

Could you point us to resources on setting up IntelliJ for Android development?

http://wiki.jetbrains.net/intellij/Android

You could also use Maven by instantiating a maven archetype from here: https://github.com/akquinet/android-archetypes/wiki

The resulting pom can be opened as a project by IntelliJ IDEA.

IntelliJ has very good support for Maven! Plus you can build you project with(out) any IDE.

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