About a year and a half ago, my manager suggested that I learn Android development, so I played around with the SDK for a few days and then got distracted by real work. Now that my role at work has changed, my manager again encouraged me to learn it and said that I could goto a class if it would help. So, this past week, I went to a class given by Big Nerd Ranch outside of Atlanta, GA. The class was quite informative, I learned a little Java and a lot more about Android than I probably needed to know.
I currently have no plans to write Android apps, but knowing a bit about it should help me better understand the other half and make it easier for me to communicate with my Android counterparts.
The biggest thing that I think is a stumbling block for learning Android is the development tools. Many developers use the Eclipse IDE. Any iOS developer that complains about Xcode, needs to use Eclipse for a day. Eclipse and the Android tools are extremely unpolished, buggy, and hacky. I’ve realized that this is probably the reason I didn’t get very far in the past; I like high quality developer tools and they just don’t seem to exist for Android.
Is it a telling sign that the instructor carries an iPhone?