I’ve been hankering to try out programming for a device. I did a hello world app for my pocketpc with c++ years ago. Apparently it didn’t hold my interest cuz I never did much with it. I am not enthusiastic about the iphone and its developer requirements and restrictions (way to piss on the developers Apple). So I’ve been wanting to try out Android for awhile now.

I was excited to see a new beta book out by Pragmatic Programmers — on Android! hot dog! I bought it the same day and installed the SDK, Eclipse and the Eclipse plugins on my macbook. I installed an emulator too. It worked without a hitch — which I kinda expected there to be some goofy java error or some nonsense that would frustrate and discourage me. Nope — worked real easy.

The intro was real easy to understand and explained the different components. The book tells you about a soduko game that you will develop over the course of the book. I like that idea and I think its an excellent way to learn.

I do the Hello World application following the instructions in the book (yeah I know there are hello world tutorials on the google site). Whoo hoo! It worked! Excited I move on.

The next example I had some problems with. I think some code is missing from the book. I looked high and low and emailed the author and logged a issue at PragProg.com … no response yet, but I figured out if I just removed that part of the code then it worked. Just didn’t have a background color set. Oh well — I’ll be patient to see if someone gets back to me or its fixed in the next version of the book.

Moving on, I see code snippits that should be in certain files but not sure where in the file they go and I think sometime they are missing some import statements. I get errors and I poke around to figure it out ..and I give up for the moment … :(

Its a beta book.. so.. guess we’ll have to wait till the next version comes out..

Meanwhile I checked out some of the examples that Google has on their site.

The author got back to me and told me to check out the source code for the sample program….and he’d try to make it more clear about the background color.

I will keep plugging on!