Android PDF course

Create apps for Android

Android is a mobile operating system, that is to say, just like Windows or Linux is a large program, consisting of small programs, which can run other software. For example, Windows allows you to run Internet Explorer, and to do this, it must link the mouse and cursor on the screen, between the keyboard and input fields, and so on. And with the explosion of smartphone sales in recent years, Android has taken an important place in the daily lives of millions of people, to the point that it is the mobile operating system with the most applications in circulation .

How about developing your own apps for Android, bringing them to the world via the Play Store, the Google Apps Marketplace? This is the goal of this course: to learn how to become autonomous to create complete and complex Android applications from A to Z!

However, to take this course, you will need some knowledge:

• Android applications are almost all coded in Java, you need to know this language. Fortunately, OpenClassrooms offers a course, a book and even a MOOC on Java.
• This is not essential, but a chapter will ask you to know a minimum of SQL for queries (that's good, OpenClassrooms offers a course on MySQL). If you know absolutely nothing about SQL, you will still be able to take the course in its entirety, but it will not be useful to try to make databases.
• And finally, being an autonomous minimum in computer science: you must for example be able to install software by yourself (you see, I do not ask you for the moon: p).

To begin this course gently, I propose you to present this platform, its universe, its objectives, then to remind you of the vocabulary essential to understand this course. Next, we'll discuss the basics for Android development so you can make simple apps that work with most devices. Then we'll see everything you need to know in order to create beautiful graphical interfaces; and finally we will discuss more advanced concepts to exploit the many facets of Android, including different function libraries to take advantage of the hardware capabilities of devices.

By the end of this course, you will be able to make games, geolocation applications, a web browser, social applications, and so on. In fact, the only brake will be your imagination!

Still a little patience, serious things will start in the next chapter. In the meantime, we will install a development environment that allows us to build our applications.

Initial conditions

First of all, I propose to check that your development machine allows you to follow this course.

Need for everyone
2 GB of RAM, but we will not hide that below 8 GB you may be limited.

More than 1.5 GB of disk space to install everything.

Processor level, emulation can only be done on 1 core of your processor, so increasing the number of hearts will not help you much. It's really pure power that counts. So there is no minimum but the fastest will be the best.

For Windows
You will need to have Windows Vista or later.

For Mac OS
You will need Mac OS 10.8.5 or later.

For Linux
Regarding GNU / Linux, Google recommends using a Ubuntu distribution newer than 14.04. Your desktop will have to work with GNOME or KDE. Finally, in general, any distribution is suitable as long as your GNU C library (glibc) is at least version 2.15. If you have a 64-bit distribution, it will need to be able to launch 32-bit applications.

Download free PDF tutorial about Android development language.