On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 11:37 AM, Tony Houghton <h...@realh.co.uk> wrote: > I want to develop/port games for Android. Most of the Android books > assume some knowledge of Java which I don't really know yet. I'm an > experienced C programmer (including use of GObject so I'm familiar with > concepts like Interfaces), and have done a bit of C++, so I don't think > I'll have much trouble picking up the core language of Java. The > difficult part of learning a new programming language is learning its > libraries and I think Java has a huge range, so a book/online tutorial > which focuses on the ones most likely to be useful in Android would be > helpful. > > Any recommendations? >
I think the general advice that is given in this situation is that Java isn't all that hard to learn. You can go find the books written by Sun (well I guess Oracle) on Java, and these tend to be pretty good guides. As far as the libraries you need for *Android*, you should only consider the standard core APIs, excluding the GUI stuff in Java. In other words, don't buy a book that is heavily dependent on using Swing, etc... (actually it appears that this might be somewhat hard to do..). A bit of searching reveals some common answers: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/167179/java-tutorial I'll echo that the 'standard' java tutorials are very good and you should start there, definitely avoiding the "learn x in fixnum days." If you're coming from C the hardest thing will be adapting to thinking in object oriented terms. This might not be too difficult, but there are some fairly deep concepts that just working with examples in the SDK demos might not explain. Bruce Eckel's books come up again and again for this sort of thing. I will emphasize, however, that java just simply isn't that hard a language, and picking up Android is much more about understanding the framework and design rather than the Java language. Oh, and wanting to write games rather than standard apps adds some multiplier to your learning time, because you'll necessarily (unless you're doing simple java games that just work with 2d graphics packages) be doing something complicated under the covers involving the hardware.. And in general graphics programming just has math behind it that other areas of programming don't (necessarily). Kris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
