1. Introduction.

This is an introduction lesson. Here we will not code anything yet, I will write down the reasons that prompted me to create this site.

I began my acquaintance with the development of Android with examples on the official site. I did not understand half of what I was doing. But I learned some knowledge from there and read some theories on the same resource. At this, my acquaintance with Android ended) I did not know where to go next. For some reason I did not think about books, but in vain ...

Later, I came across an article “Five of the best Android development books”. Interest appeared again, it became clear where to go, I began to read these books. I understood not everything, but already much more than from the first examples. But if you read such books completely from scratch, then much will not be obvious and incomprehensible.

Therefore, I want to try to create lessons on Android for beginners, so that the reader does not have any obscure themes behind him. I will try to explain everything in as much detail as possible and to make various examples for greater clarity. With each new lesson I will introduce and use new concepts and objects, and use objects from past lessons to consolidate.

I try to make each lesson as independent and isolated as possible so that you can go in, look at the topic you want and not view a lot of excess. Examples try to select the most clearly reflecting the topic of the lesson.

Unlike some authors, I don’t intend to teach you how to program in 24 hours or 30 lessons. We all understand that this is impossible) I do not know how many lessons I will get. I think that about a hundred is enough to give the whole basis in sufficient detail. And then another hundred will go to various advanced chips. In general, those who begin to study, most likely will not have to run a lot on other sites (except the official help) for additional knowledge. Here you will find a lot of useful, consistent and plain language information.

It should be understood that my lessons are not always a guide on how to do it. I can neglect something and miss something in order to show the topic of the lesson and not give extra material. Therefore, I ask you not to consider everything stated in the lessons as the only correct way of implementation.

If you have problems with Android, then the site has a wonderful forum that is always happy to help beginners understand even the simplest questions. True, he is protected from spammers with a control question and you can only answer it in order to register, having read the first five lessons. This is a forced defense. But, since the introduction of this issue, not a single spammer has entered the forum!

Currently lessons cover topics:

• - screen creation (in the editor and programmatically)
• - click handlers
• - logs and pop-up message
• - regular menu, context menu
• - animation of view components
• - create and call Activity (+ return result)
• - Activity Lifecycle (Activity states)
• - Intent, Intent Filter
• - data storage (Preferences, SQLite)
• - list and adapters
• - dialogues
• - Parcel, Parcelable
• - Preferences when storing application settings
• - work with files
• - Tab tabs
• - XML ​​parsing
• - asynchronous (Handler, AsyncTask)
• - Services
• - Content Provider
• - touch processing, multitouch
• - fragments
• - Action Bar, ActionMode
• - widgets
• - keys and signature of the application
• - ViewPager
• - audio and video playback
• - sound recording
• - work with the camera
• - sensors
• - GPS
• - Google Maps
• - drawing

I continue to read books and lessons will appear until I myself develop. As a result, I think we will come to the conclusion that we will become quite advanced developers demanded in the market. In general, as one clown from the zomboyaschik says - "do not switch") It will be interesting!

In the next lesson, we will install and configure the Android application development environment.

Development is conducted in Java. You may also need knowledge of SQL, XML and other related technologies. It is believed that you are familiar with them. If not, then something basic in Java will need to be read.

Google periodically releases Android updates for the development environment. Therefore, it is possible that the content of the lesson is a bit outdated and the real picture is different from the screenshots. If this difference is cardinal or examples do not work, write about it on the forum in the thread of the lesson. We will update. If the difference is only in the background color of the application or the font size, then this, of course, is not critical and does not affect the lesson’s message.

It is also noted that the behavior of the code on different versions of the system may be different. I did not check the performance of the material lessons on all possible versions, so your results may differ from mine.

Sometimes there are statements that most of the lessons are made for Android 3, and now the Android version has already been released, for example. One freak somehow wrote that 90% of the lessons consist of deprecated methods. I really do not like to comment on nonsense, but for beginners, I will express my opinion on this whole amateurishness.

I can not redo all the lessons with each release of the new version of android. Moreover, it is not necessary to redo it. The vast majority of lessons will remain the same and everything will work fine on any version. In addition, the share of devices on Android 2.X is still large enough to be neglected. And you in your applications will specify the minimum version 2.2 or 2.3, so as not to lose a whole segment of users. So I do not understand what is the meaning of kipish.

Yes, there is such that with the release of new versions, some lessons are really drastically outdated and need to be updated. This, for example, affected Lesson 52, and I did an update in a separate lesson. But to constantly monitor and update the whole lesson due to the fact that there is now one method (oh, horror-horror !!!) deprecated - this is hard. Do not forget that I do the site in my free time. And I'd rather spend it on writing new materials than on tracking and fixing obsolete methods.

For Google methods, usually for obsolete methods gives a link to a new method. So if you see that Eclipse swears at an outdated method, then just look for it in the help and see what it was replaced with.