Android programming, looking for good guides for beginners

To be honest, Apple’s own tutorials aren’t really that much better, and are also often outdated.

Raywenderlich.com is always my first pick.

I have a pet theory that mobile development is deliberately intractable as a kind of gatekeeping tactic. There's certainly no excuse for it to be as inaccessible as it is, with the resources available. There is an aggressive rejection of the mobile phone as a user-oriented computing platform - instead you must be a "developer", and to prove that you are a "developer" you must devote an enormous amount of disk space to "developer tools" and tolerate byzantine project structures and weird languages, which require byzantine IDEs to manage. The provision for writing software actually on these devices with an order of magnitude more power than a Cray-2 is actively suppressed. God forbid I be able to write a friggin Python script on my phone...

This isn't necessarily conscious conspiracy on the part of the perpetrators. But it's a systemic attitude that ultimately has the same effect, and the incentives point in that direction. Remember, Google/Apple only make money on their respective app stores when you buy an app - free apps are worthless to them, as are apps you write yourself; free software apps that let you escape the ecosystem are worse than worthless!

Interestingly, the docs for Flutter are comprehensive and overall just really excellent.

Maybe they shifted focus to that in the past years.

Is there any example where a library/framework's creator has the best getting started documentation for learning how to use it?

I'm lazy and not very academic, and I feel like I always end up following a Medium or Hackernoon tutorial and using the official API docs for supplemental reference. I feel like this has been my experience for Flutter, React, ReactNative, Docker. I'm actually curious what folks' favorite 1st party docs are.

I've been reading those Android docs. It's not great but better than nothing.

Unless things have changed drastically in the past 6 months, Flutter still isn't ready for the limelight.

It trails React Native significantly.

The official documentation is terrible. It's practically an example of how bad documentation can get. The developer documents are verbose and say little.

This is perhaps one of the most commonly used widgets in Android: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v7/w...

It doesn't say why it's deprecated and what it's replaced with. The link is even more confusing. And the document itself also doesn't say what a RecyclerView is or how to use it.

I don't know why you get downvoted. If they are a complete beginner, they should go to https://developer.android.com/guide and first learn about the concepts such as Intents, Resources, Android Manifest, Activities/Fragments etc. It's all there in one place.

That's a good idea. I did the University of Maryland Coursera course and I liked it a lot:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/android-programming

I just bought his Swift book collection based on a colleague’s advice - I particularly wanted this book on Unit Testing.

I’ve loved them. Just chiming in to also suggest them.