

Google offers free Android development Udacity course - hansy
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2014/07/learn-to-think-like-android-developer.html?

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dhawalhs
Direct link to the course page:

[https://www.udacity.com/course/ud853](https://www.udacity.com/course/ud853)

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roma1n
Okay, I realize that complaining about pricing makes little sense, but
$150/month for the "full" course, with the free option labelled as a simple
"textbook"?

That changes the mooc positionning somewhat. In my case (student) I would not
take the full course.

Seems that Coursera is doing something right in that respect: you can get a
verified certificate for $49, or pay to get a capstone project graded
individually. You also get to complete a substantial part of the course before
committing to a certificate. That brings value to individual students while
keeping the price affordable.

/end of pointless rant

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TheAlchemist
Just watched most of the material. Really great stuff. Good android tutorials
are hard to find in my opinion. Even in the official documentation, most of
the time it's quite long and always 'support libs' oriented.

Those videos are by far the best learning material on Android I have found so
far.

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nstart
Thanks for this. I'm excited about this course. Personally I never really
liked the course material in the developer docs. It seems structured, but you
can go into way too many directions at once. At least that's what happened to
me

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algorithms
My question to other android developers and especially people in hiring
positions:

Do you think such a certificate would be a deciding factor in the hiring
process? (Especially for entry-level positions, but also generally)

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on_and_off
what matters is what you can do, how much you understand the platform tools
(it is not required of a junior developer to write renderscript kernels, but
he/she at least need to know basic concepts such as view recycling or view
holders) and whether you are able to write maintainable & extensible code.
This course probably help for at least some of these points.

I just reviewed a test made by somebody that would like to join our team.
There were some very weird use of view in there, for example holding
references to dozens of view objects in order to display them in a grid
instead of caching the bitmap themselves, among other things. That was a big
no-no. A junior developer is going to make mistakes (and she already has a
couple of years of experience) but if each of his/her code reviews end up with
a -2, both parties are going to lose their time.

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cliveowen
The highest barrier of entry for Android programming isn't the lack of
learning resources but the need to use Eclipse/Android Studio coupled with
very bad documentation.

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ansimionescu
I'm fairly sure you can use IntelliJ as well. Yep, there you go:
[http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/android.html](http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/android.html)

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octopus
Android Studio is based on IntelliJ (the Community Edition if I remember
correctly).

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georgemcbay
Yes, this is correct.

Also, you don't have to use Eclipse or Android Studio at all if you don't want
to. You can use whatever text editor and whatever build system floats your
boat (ant and gradle are common).

The only time I use either of the Android IDEs (Android Studio, because
Eclipse is horrible) is when I need to do on-device visual debugging;
otherwise I just do command-line builds and deploy using adb.

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sidcool
I have started with the lessons and the beginning is quite promising.

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adamors
> $150/month

> Free 2 week trial.

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sgk284
The Udacity site has gotten a little aggressive / spammy with trying to force
people into paying... but if you click "view courseware" you get the full
course for free.

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bhavysw
good know that google started free course.

