On 05/27/2011 02:55 PM, Bob Keeland wrote:
OK, I'm new to Android and intend to write some scentific apps for smartphones. I need some advice. I have never used Java (mostly Visual Basic) so I guess I need to learn Java. Any suggestions on learn-java books? I've downloaded Java SE and several Android related things, and I've got the Professor Eck tutorial for Java. So far the tutorial seems to be very basic. Any suggestions on the best procedure for moving on (even if it's just PUNT and leave this to someone who knows what they are doing)? Bob Keeland, Ph.D. Research Forest Ecologist Louisiana, US
Generally when I move into a new language I look for decent "cookbooks" which are generally written for people who already know programming. "Decent" can be hard to define as some writers get carried away and do overblown examples that you have to dig through and pull out what you're looking for. That's what I always liked about the MSDN is that the examples were concise and too the point. Much of what I've done on Android is from the online docs and when those (often) fell short there was always Stackoverflow or someone's blog where they tackled the problem. One thing I've run into on development platforms are examples where it looks like whoever wrote the example thought the idea was to show off their programming skills for their next gig and hence the example was overblown.
As for Java I played with it a bit back in the late 90's as Microsoft's J++. About 5 years back I decided to move some of my C++ code to Java so I could make some free software that would run on all platforms. I picked up "Java DeMystified" by Jim Keogh for a quick study and reference. Otherwise much else of what I needed was online either from Sun or blog articles. BTW, I found that there was little to do other than search replace to make some of my C and C++ functions work on Java mainly with pointers and of course the way the function was called.
One thing over the years I've learned is to not heavily vest oneself in any one platform or language but thankfully those "language of the week" years which we had back in the 1990s are over. I also learned when managing a programming department that my most productive programmers were the ones that "winged it" and the least productive the ones that felt they needed to know everything about the API before they wrote a line of code. Life it too short for that.
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