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Developing Android Apps – Course Review

Developing Android Apps is a course by Google on Udacity that covers a lot of what you need to know to start developing for Android on Android Studio.

I took the course several months ago, but procrastinated writing about till now (I really wanted to go through my review backlog before New Years). I did the free version of the course – not because it was expensive, but the extra benefit seemed negligible for me and I was afraid that I might have to drop out due to my very poor Java skills (not an actual problem).

Thus, my impressions are definitely fuzzier than they should be.

The course was pretty good. Thankfully, I didn't start it just as it was released, but rather like a month after. So a lot of the initial problems were taken care of. Still, a lot of the time you'd have to read the instructor notes, and ignore most of the video as it was just plain wrong.

The course starts at installing Android Studio and setting up your Android device, all the way to developing a weather app that uses best practices to cache and download its data.

As an aside, I really enjoyed using Android Studio, despite some minor problems (including a time where it simply started complaining about nonsensical problems with my code until I forced a rebuild).

Overall, recommended.

By Luiz A D R Marques

I've been developing software and selling it on-line since 1994. Current products include STG FolderPrint Plus - a tool to Print Folders, and STGThumb - HTML Album Generator, among others. Some of my other sites - Disk Usage, Directory Printer ,Print Folders and Jejum Intermitente .