Androiding

First of all I wanna say Hello World!. Well it is fitting as I am learning to code in a new language ie Java and xml for android. I must say I was very intimidated by the whole development environment of android. I have tried to do it many times in the past but always gave up even before starting.

But this time round I am making good progress. I found this great course from Udacity called Android Development for Beginners. It guides you through all the steps involved in setting up your work environment for android development.
         Here's a short walk through of the steps

• Download the Android Studio which is an IDE (Integarted Development Environment). IDE is like your workshop (the building) where you will build your android apps. And just like a regular workshop you will need tools to work in the workshop here comes the Android Software Development Kit (SDK).
• Then you will need to install the drivers for your android device that you will use to test your apps.

And the best thing about this course is that the only pre requisites are knowledge of the English language and absolutely no prior programming experience is required to go through this course.

The course has three modules.

• First part deals with the layout of an android app. How your text and pictures and other buttons etc are positioned on the screen is taught in this portion. For layout, android uses a mark up language called XML. Another example of a mark up language is HTML which is used to make webpages on the internet just like the one I am using to display this blog.
• Second part of the course deals with making your app interactive. This means that you put some code which will do something once a button on your app is pressed or touched or tapped. This requires coding in Java programming language. Please note here that Java and Javascript are not the same. 
•  Third part deals with Object Oriented Programming. If this sounds intimidating then don't worry because the course is paced very gently so that everyone can understand the very basic concepts. 

The course also offers interviews with actual developers working at Google who share first hand their experiences and real world problems that they faced while developing some apps. 

This course has opened the world of android app development for me. I have also made a calculator app using whatever I've learnt so far and I've only done two parts of the course. I also have a friend who has helped me a lot in learning some advanced concepts of android development.