Slashdot Mirror
Google Launches Android Programming Course For Absolute Beginners (zdnet.com)
If you're on the fence on whether or not should you spring for learning how to code, Google is willing to offer a helping hand. The company has partnered with Udacity to offer a "nanodegree" class designed for people with no programming experience at all. The program costs $199 per month. ZDNet reports:The course material, developed by Google, is hosted on learning platform Udacity and builds on earlier programs such as the Android Nanodegree for Beginners. The basics course takes around four weeks if the student commits six hours a week and upon completion they'll have created two basic apps built in Android Studio."Google, in partnership with Udacity, is making Android development accessible and understandable to everyone, so that regardless of your background, you can learn to build apps that improve the lives of people around you," Google announced on its developer blog.
problems begging solutions are. When I was programming professionally I never thought being able to program was as important as having a problem to solve requiring a programming language. App development is the same, find a reason to program, solve the problem in your mind, apply a language and you are a programmer.
Well at least someone figured out how to make money with Android apps: Udacity.
After about 8 weeks of total combined android development under the belt... yeah, Android kinda sucks. It just feels weird. It's both too low-level AND too abstracted. It is very class hierarchy-bound, in an ugly way. It forces an app life cycle that is alien to me.
The navigation and data flow between activities and their state is not very obvious. Nothing is obvious. Naming is strange. Using bundles for communicating data between parts of the app is too difficult beyond primitive data types and strings, so I just use static fields now. It's just horrible.
Things seem to break in unexpected ways. My brain hurts every time I have to look up anything new, nothing is made easy by default. Doing anything worthwhile simply takes a lot of time. Some things are just broken, like list view scroll indexing requiring you to basically to re-create the entire object structure if you want to change the data.
Maybe I'm just still new at this, but it hasn't clicked with me. My background is in web apps, mostly java back end and fugly front ends.