The Long Road to Developing for Android Starts Here

I haven't programmed since my first C program to check local bus times back in College (I did physics and programming was a tiny course in first year). I've always been a little intimidated by code but I've decided to take the plunge and I want to write apps for Android.

The first step of course is to learn how to program in Java. I picked up a great e-book on the Android Market:

Learning Java for Android on AppBrain

I can tell you that the $5 are definitely worth it; while there are a lot of free online resources, I've found this book to be very clear with good explanations of the concepts.

I've been reading it for almost a week now and trying out all the tutorials. For further tutorials I've been using the course notes from MIT OpenCourseware for Java beginners.

• Course Notes
• Labs (More Hands-on)

So far I've only built a few "Hello World" type programs and a few unit converter type programs. Most of them I run in command line (I'm using Ubuntu 10.4 but there are JDK's for all the major platforms), but the e-book gives tutorials for GUI "Hello World" programs. I've been using the two together and trying to combine the concepts to get a feeling for Java. In only a week I feel much more comfortable looking at and editing .java files. 

Writing, compiling and running your programs depends on your environment, I am using OpenJDK6, but I'd suggest you go to the Sun site to get instructions specific to your system along with all the required bits and bobs to get started with the tutorials.

Still a long way to go of course, but the resources I've linked to above have been helping me a lot. If any readers can think of other good resources for the absolute beginner, stick them in the comments and I'll update this post with any I find particularly useful.

UPDATE: For those like me on Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid) you'll need to add a source to your package manager to be able to download the Java Development Kit. The following command will add it to your sources list from the terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"