Re: [android-developers] Recommended reading to learn Java for Android

On Fri, 9 Dec 2011 18:49:45 -0500
Kristopher Micinski <krismicinski@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 11:37 AM, Tony Houghton <h@realh.co.uk> wrote:

[Snip]

> > Any recommendations?
>
> I think the general advice that is given in this situation is that
> Java isn't all that hard to learn. You can go find the books written
> by Sun (well I guess Oracle) on Java, and these tend to be pretty good
> guides. As far as the libraries you need for *Android*, you should
> only consider the standard core APIs, excluding the GUI stuff in Java.
> In other words, don't buy a book that is heavily dependent on using
> Swing, etc... (actually it appears that this might be somewhat hard to
> do..).
>
> A bit of searching reveals some common answers:
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/167179/java-tutorial
>
> I'll echo that the 'standard' java tutorials are very good and you
> should start there, definitely avoiding the "learn x in fixnum days."

Thanks, that's a big help. My reason for asking instead of Googling was
because it's difficult to use Google to answer a question like, "Which
libraries should I concentrate on for Android?" and to filter out the
most useful hits on such huge topics as Java and Android in general.

> If you're coming from C the hardest thing will be adapting to thinking
> in object oriented terms. This might not be too difficult, but there
> are some fairly deep concepts that just working with examples in the
> SDK demos might not explain. Bruce Eckel's books come up again and
> again for this sort of thing. I will emphasize, however, that java
> just simply isn't that hard a language, and picking up Android is much
> more about understanding the framework and design rather than the Java
> language.

I never liked C++ much, but I've been using GObject with C a lot lately,
which adds OO support. The syntax can get a bit cumbersome so hopefully
it'll be refreshing to use a language which was designed around these
concepts with less complexity than C++.

> Oh, and wanting to write games rather than standard apps adds some
> multiplier to your learning time, because you'll necessarily (unless
> you're doing simple java games that just work with 2d graphics
> packages) be doing something complicated under the covers involving
> the hardware.. And in general graphics programming just has math
> behind it that other areas of programming don't (necessarily).

I'll start by porting/reimplementing my own game, Bombz
<http://bombz.sourceforge.net/>, which is very simple, and what I've got
in mind for after that doesn't add any significant complications beyond
scrolling. I've got "Beginnin Android Games" on my Christmas list which
should be fine for that sort of thing. Beyond that I should be a
seasoned Android programmer ready to tackle OpenGL and linking with C
:).

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