I’m trying to pick up a bit of Android development experience. Here’s some tips for getting started from scratch.  I have a lot to learn…

Documentation and Tutorials

What is Android? — Quick start on architecture .

Application Fundamentals — Terminology and Components

Hello, World tutorial — very basic tutorial

Notepad tutorial — nice tutorial with “problems” to work though, as well as a clear goal.  Demonstrates different parts of an app’s lifecycle.

Development Set-Up

You’ll have to go through several steps to get a fully working development environment.  Start with the Android SDK.  Download to somewhere reasonable, then cd into {android’s home}/tools and run android.  This brings up the SDK/AVD manager, which can pull down samples, documentation, and runtime environments for the different Android versions.  It also is where you set up and launch the device emulators.

Get the Eclipse plug-in for Android next, if you like that sort of thing.  Be sure to configure the SDK location in your preferences.  Note that you can launch the SDK/AVD manager right out of Eclipse, if you like.  If you don’t want to use the plug in, be sure to check the documentation for the command-line tools, which can do many (if not all) of the Eclipse plugin’s functions.