Android development tutorials(p-xr.com)
p-xr.com
Android development tutorials
http://p-xr.com/
2 comments
Can somebody who has experience developing Android apps give an opinion on the quality of this tutorials (code wise).
From a brief look... the blog is part aggregation and part original content. So that links to posts outside the domain are going to vary greatly in quality.
Most of the tutorials focus on how to mechanically get something done. For instance, reading a SOAP service, changing some fonts and backgrounds, and others. This will not tell you how to design a program. It just tells you how to accomplish some small task. There is no guidance on abstractions and code organization, just tips on getting some little thing done.
I don't know of any design-oriented android resources. The Google Dev Guide is quite good and offers a lot of advice. Read it like it is a book. The "Busy Coder Guides" are highly touted, but they are again about implementation and not design/organization. Also, I have Pro Android and it too suffers from this problem, despite being over 100 pages long!
My advice is keep it as simple as possible. Avoid too much abstraction and redirection unless you benefit from it; just build what you need today. If you ever write an object called ServiceFactoryContainerBundle then stop and simplify. And if you find yourself writing a "form generator" framework then stop and ask yourself "what is my product?". Unless you're trying to sell a form generator framework then again stop and simplify. Just my 2 cents.
Most of the tutorials focus on how to mechanically get something done. For instance, reading a SOAP service, changing some fonts and backgrounds, and others. This will not tell you how to design a program. It just tells you how to accomplish some small task. There is no guidance on abstractions and code organization, just tips on getting some little thing done.
I don't know of any design-oriented android resources. The Google Dev Guide is quite good and offers a lot of advice. Read it like it is a book. The "Busy Coder Guides" are highly touted, but they are again about implementation and not design/organization. Also, I have Pro Android and it too suffers from this problem, despite being over 100 pages long!
My advice is keep it as simple as possible. Avoid too much abstraction and redirection unless you benefit from it; just build what you need today. If you ever write an object called ServiceFactoryContainerBundle then stop and simplify. And if you find yourself writing a "form generator" framework then stop and ask yourself "what is my product?". Unless you're trying to sell a form generator framework then again stop and simplify. Just my 2 cents.
The issues you address aren't Android specific though and probably shouldn't be addressed by "Android" tutorials since they aren't specific to the platform.
There's thenewboston.com for video tutorials, and also anddev.org.
Looks ok. It's really just showing the very basics. A few improvements I'd suggest is moving the Strings to strings.xml (makes translating easy later on), and not downloading the JSON in the UI thread since it will be blocking it.
One thing I wish I had discovered earlier is that some devs from Google released the sources for a "Google I/O" app for the last two years, and that reading that code teaches you a lot of how to design a good app.
The Google I/O app uses (and sometimes introduces) many useful patterns in UI design and Architecture design. It scales to all kind of screen sizes, hardware configurations and platform versions.
Here is a link to a resource page for the Android Developer Lab in Paris. You can find links to Google I/O 2011 and two other examples there.
https://sites.google.com/site/androiddevlabs2011/code-lab-pa...
Oh, and also: http://www.pushing-pixels.org/
The Google I/O app uses (and sometimes introduces) many useful patterns in UI design and Architecture design. It scales to all kind of screen sizes, hardware configurations and platform versions.
Here is a link to a resource page for the Android Developer Lab in Paris. You can find links to Google I/O 2011 and two other examples there.
https://sites.google.com/site/androiddevlabs2011/code-lab-pa...
Oh, and also: http://www.pushing-pixels.org/