I few weeks ago, I decided to try my hand at Android application development. So I began searching around for some beginner level tutorials on getting into Android. To my surprise, I was immediately struck by how developer-unfriendly most of the resources available on the web are. (Including the Google ones)

I’m worked developing software for a few years now (though I admit much of that has been in the web development world) and I’m not new to Java, but I haven’t tried programming for mobile devices before.  Still, I found even setting up Eclipse and my development environment a challenge with lots of messing about to work around the vagaries in the documentation.

After several hours spent setting up my development environment, I finally managed to get through the “hello world” tutorial on the android developers blog but while it was straightforward I felt that the only skill I really honed in the process was copy/pasting.

So I spent a few more days trying tutorials from other sources with varying levels of success until I finally found what I feel is a really good entry-level tutorial for people who can handle a bit of Java but are new to Android. If you’ve set up your development environment (ill probably post a helper on that soon) and don’t know where to go next, check out this excellent screencast, it really put me on the right track…