Android programming, looking for good guides for beginners • Hacker News Board

Re: Android programming, looking for good guides for beginners

#11

Post by muzani » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 12:26 AM UTC

There are some good code examples on http://guides.codepath.com/android

They're all outdated now, still in Java. It's open source, so I might actually get around to contributing to them.

Re: Android programming, looking for good guides for beginners

#12

Post by SkyPuncher » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 12:32 AM UTC

rubyskills wrote: post #7

This may be a little of topic, but I think that Google's Flutter is really game changing. It let's you write your app once and deploy down to iOS and Android and does so compiled to the target environment. Compared to other cross platform mobile development frameworks, I think they're at the top performance wise.

Unless things have changed drastically in the past 6 months, Flutter still isn't ready for the limelight.

It trails React Native significantly.

Re: Android programming, looking for good guides for beginners

#13

Post by lgleason » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 12:35 AM UTC

The Ray Wenderlich stuff is pretty good. (Full disclosure, I wrote a book for them so I am biased :))

Re: Android programming, looking for good guides for beginners

#14

Post by lostgame » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #2

I'm not sure how mainstream of an opinion this is, but I'd suggest skipping Google's own tutorials. It would be reasonable to suppose that a multi-billion-dollar corporation that massively benefits from a thriving developer community would put out first-rate documentation, but I was quite disappointed by how much of an inconsistent and incomplete mess those tutorials are. While I've only briefly skimmed it myself, I'…

To be honest, Apple’s own tutorials aren’t really that much better, and are also often outdated.

Raywenderlich.com is always my first pick.

Re: Android programming, looking for good guides for beginners

#15

Post by lostgame » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 1:13 AM UTC

satysin wrote: post #5

As you also mention iOS I highly recommend Paul Hudson's books at https://www.hackingwithswift.com His 100 Days of Swift (and Swift UI) are also quite good to work through. He is widely known and respected in the iOS development community and works hard to keep it all up to date (all updates are included if you purchase his books).

I just bought his Swift book collection based on a colleague’s advice - I particularly wanted this book on Unit Testing.

I’ve loved them. Just chiming in to also suggest them.

Re: Android programming, looking for good guides for beginners

#16

Post by throwawaybbq1 » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

There used to be this awesome resource called codepath. They took a developer from tutorials to actual intermediate/senior tier. It was a bay area hands-on thing but I would frequently watch their recorded videos or their online documentation. They still have some material up but a lot is gone (e.g. videos) and I am doubtful if things are up to date. But yeah .. that was awesome and I still point my engineers to what remaining resources they have left online.

Re: Android programming, looking for good guides for beginners

#17

Post by analog31 » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 2:17 AM UTC

This is without knowing your existing background in programming, or your ambitions.

I was interested in something similar, many years ago, and realized that the app I wanted to write didn't call upon any of the internal resources of the Android phone. So I was able to write it in Javascript / HTML, and it runs on any platform in a browser.

Re: Android programming, looking for good guides for beginners

#18

Post by yaitsyaboi » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 2:49 AM UTC

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #2

I'm not sure how mainstream of an opinion this is, but I'd suggest skipping Google's own tutorials. It would be reasonable to suppose that a multi-billion-dollar corporation that massively benefits from a thriving developer community would put out first-rate documentation, but I was quite disappointed by how much of an inconsistent and incomplete mess those tutorials are. While I've only briefly skimmed it myself, I'…

Is there any example where a library/framework's creator has the best getting started documentation for learning how to use it?

I'm lazy and not very academic, and I feel like I always end up following a Medium or Hackernoon tutorial and using the official API docs for supplemental reference. I feel like this has been my experience for Flutter, React, ReactNative, Docker. I'm actually curious what folks' favorite 1st party docs are.