Last week I attended Big Nerd Ranch’s Android bootcamp. Wow! What an awesome week! So, I was only marginally familiar with the Andoird SDK before I attended the bootcamp. These are the kinds of things I knew before going to class…

1. Adb logcat is a command that opens the log of what’s really going on under the hood. Adb stands for android debug bridge. Typing adb logcat at a terminal/command prompt while the emulator is running provides you with a very useful console log.
2. Screen layouts are controlled by xml, an android specific xml format.
3. Resources classes are compiled from the layout, strings and other xml files in res folder and can be referenced in code by R.layout.name_of_layout_xml. These resources can make little red x’s in Eclipse show up even when there isn’t a real problem with your code because you just need to clean/build.
4. Apps aren’t deployed as wars or jars. They are deployed in an apk.
5. The activity lifecycle includes a number of methods that you can override, including onCreate and onPause.
6. I had done some tutorials, bought some books, and looked over several of sites I had also asked for help, but nothing really got the concepts in my head like the training at the Big Nerd Ranch.

We covered a ton of stuff over the course of the week: Layouts—lists, spinners, radio buttons, Activities (multiple activities), Menus, Saving to Database, Notifications, Toasts, Video, Webkit, Location, Intents, Content Providers, AIDLs, Services, Dailing a number, Maps… (there were more topics, but these are the ones that really stood out).

There were modules on each of these topics complete with code examples and exercises, which has really been helping out now that I am back at home writing Android apps as fast as my little fingers can type.

The time our class spent together eating meals was incredibly instructive—as folks drilled our instructor with Android-related questions. :) Here are some of my notes from class. After the course, I am re-writing the Android Sheep app and am working on my own “to do” list app—original, huh.