Published My First App After Watching YouTube Tutorials for a Week

I originally posted this on Reddit sometime in August.  http://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/1j6f5h/published_my_first_app_after_watching_youtube/

 I just wanted to encourage people thinking about learning to develop apps that you can learn to program Android Apps after a relatively minimal amount of training.

I went through about 50 lessons at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUOWNXGRc6g starting last Wednesday. By this past Tuesday, I felt I had learned enough and went ahead and developed a very simple app that I eventually published in about two days.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jkimgroup.tvareapricecomparison

SOME OF MY BACKGROUND:

• I did take some basic courses in Java back in college, about two classes, but that was back in 2001.


• I'm fairly practiced in the "copy and paste" methodologies and Googling concepts for HTML, CSS, for various Wordpress Blogs I maintain.

Even if you're not as "tech savvy" as I am, I believe that you could develop your own app and publish it within a month if you have enough diligence and are willing to push yourself.

I'd actually say developing Android apps is MUCH easier than trying to develop straight Java. I was thinking I'd have to learn Java before learning to develop for Android, but I think I saved myself TONS of headache by jumping straight in.

Android has a bunch of build in libraries that essentially speed up the development process and ease the learning curve!

I think I'd get more discouraged if I tried to develop a GUI for Android strictly using Java commands. Using the XML instead makes things a lot easier (for a newb like me).

Anyway, now that I saw that developing isn't impossible (thanks to StackOverflow, reference libraries, etc :) ), I see that it's more about how much time I actually want to invest in developing apps.

Now if I could only had converted my 400 hours playing Shogun 2 and Civilization V into developing Apps (and the hundreds playing other games), I may had been much richer by now :(