Today I picked up the book "Beginning Android 2" from Apress. Much of what I am doing (and am interested in) revolves around the mobile space these days, so I thought, why exclude Android? (Especially since I am in my preliminary analysis of what new phone I want at the end of the year, when the new iPhone, Android, and Win Phone 7 all are available on the market.)

First review: The book does not show you how to install the tools. That's fine; it said as much. Plus, installing on Windows vs Linux vs Mac would definitely be different across all three platforms. So, for that, I download and install the tools on my own - the JDK, Eclipse IDE, and the Android SDK. After a little bit of chugging away, they all get installed and configured (the docs were not as clear as to how to enable the SDK within Eclipse for a complete Eclipse newbie). But now, I am ready to start going into the book.

Second, I download the source code from the Apress web site. This makes it easier to manage (and makes any typos in the code not 100% my fault).

So now, I go through the first few chapters to run the Hello World application. I get an intro to all of the files and folders made when a project is created (looks like I didn't need Eclipse - the examples all use command line) and an explanation of what each is for; there is an introduction to the emulator system that is part of the SDK (LIKE: You can choose various versions of Android OS to target what you want; this is VERY nice).

So I go to the point where I want to build the project. It tells me to run "ant install" to install the package. Well, for someone new to ant and to Android, this is confusing. I have a basic Java background, most of my experience in .NET, but the code isn't the hard part. I go to the command line and run the command - "ant is not installed" or some such message. Makes sense; I know it's a third party library. So, I try in Eclipse. 

I created a new package in Eclipse and retyped the file (when Eclipse worked - it liked to not respond a lot, especially when its version of Intellisense kicked in. This got old, real fast.). Once the file was created, I ran the project. Eclipse immediately launched a new emulator (after a few configurations where done) and lo and behold! My app was not there. So, when I ran the app, it did now allow me to access it as the item implied. But, wait... I look in the settings in the emulator and see my program *WAS* installed and is on the device. So where is it? I look back in settings... and it's gone.

OK. So initial experience: not too great. Issues with the IDE, issues with the build capabilities. Will this stop me? No; it may cause some frustration in getting it to work, but I will make it work. It may make me want to do this in a Linux VM which I will setup tomorrow (it's 11 PM and I gotta work in the morning).