Karthikraj Duraisamy

Karthikraj Duraisamy

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Mastering your Android Development Skills with Google | Best tutorials, blogs, courses and guides to learn & Master Android

13 Dec 2017

Mastering your Android Development Skills with Google | Best tutorials, blogs, courses and guides to learn & Master Android

Android master Mastering your Android Development Skills

Learning to develop Android applications is fun and challenging at the same time. With the help of online learning, we can make it look like a cake walk. Especially when Google is committed to helping out the developers community. Below is the list of ways that Google and Google engineers are helping out Android developers to Mastering Android development.

Sometimes I felt the contents repeat in multiple places like vlogs and blogs. I guess Google Android Team is trying to make sure the content reaches to the developers whatever their preferred source of learning is.

Google developers youtube channel and Android developers youtube channel are the really good source to get the latest announcements and technical insights from Google. Especially in the Android developers playlist, there are many insightful playlists for different categories like Android studio tooling, Android support library, Android developer success stories, Android development patterns, Android performance patterns, Design Bytes and more. I found most of these videos are very much insightful and makes the developers job easy while developing Android applications.

Git books is one more source where Google created a web book style learning content to help the developers to prepare for the Associate Android Developer certification. Gitbooks Android training materials is a good source to start for the beginners, who want to get their basic understanding of Android application development right.

Android Developers blog is considered as a primary source to get the announcements in Android and get detailed blogs for how the API components behave. This blog post page is one of my default pages to open in my browser settings. This page needs to be checked frequently by Android developers.

Codelabs is one of the best and innovative commitment by Google to teach the technology. The step by step learning process that we can achieve by writing and understanding the code practically looks powerful. Codelabs makes sure the content reaches the developers both theoretically and practically.

Google and Udacity have partnered to create quality content for Android developers which has helped me personally. These course videos are always available for free and if you want to get a mentor-ship and real-time project with the review, then you can enroll in paid certification courses. But for self-learning, these materials are free to access so far. Google keeps updating the content in Udacity courses. Udacity course materials are must to utilize for all passionate Android developers. Google is just not committed to creating Android development help materials, the company also has other areas of development covered as well in the Udacity courses like Google Cloud.

Playbook Android application is available for Android devices which makes all its features at your ease of learning. This application helps the developers to learn about the new feature releases and best practices. Also, this app stands as an example of design inspiration too. Most of the mentioned links like Android developers blog, Youtube channel updates , and firebase announcements… etc are made available in this application. This is one of the must-have application every developer need on their device.

Every year with Google I/O event, Google open sources the I/O event app. Which is serving as a primary source for learning by reading the scalable application’s code. This app always demonstrates the latest updates that get announced in I/O event. This app is also a must open source project that should be explored by the Android developers to learn most of the required Android skills.

Google samples account in Github has a lot of sample codes for Android SDK and Android support libraries. These sample codes will help us to go deep and understand specific concepts like App components, App Architecture components and much more… You’ll find most of the Android sample code through this Github account.

GDG Programs worldwide is a promising initiative by Google to make sure the collaboration between local developers community. This collaboration helps Google to encourage the developer’s community to develop more and more frequently with Google products and it helps the developers to meet the community members and discuss the latest updates or common problems in the technology. This GDG is a must to join for Android developers. Find out a GDG community in your city and join in that to keep yourself updated. You’ll get more exposure and experience by meeting the like-minded people and by having a conversation with them. My favorite group is GDG Blrdroid and I participate in the events regularly since 2011. Study Jam is a program conducted by GDG for developers to meet in a place and learn together.

Google made available some of the Android development related books for free on Google Play Books. My favorite in the list is Build for Billions book. Build for Billions book covers the challenges that I used to face early in my career and provides elegant solutions.

Grow with Google offers free training with scholarship challenges to improve our skills. As Google is keen on getting more developers to use their API’s, the company partnered with EduTech companies like Udacity and Pluralsight to provide free courses to right candidates through scholarship challenges. Grow with Google is an initiative to encourage the developers to master Google development platforms. Currently, Google announced the scholarships with Udacity and Pluralsight. Do apply If you are really passionate about Android or Mobile Web pages.

Apart from directly improving the developer’s skills by providing course materials, Google also makes sure the updates and announcements reach everyone. To make this process more serious and easy, Google arranges some initiative by meeting the local community through DevFest, AppFest, Developer Days, Roadshows and etc… Google events. Above mentioned fests and events help us to network with other developers and listen to the updates and understand what Google is up to currently.

Obviously, this site seems like a starting point for all Android developers.

To prepare yourself towards AAD, Google suggests utilizing some of the mentioned resources. Apart from other sources, General Assembly Android course is a special edition for AAD.

Special Mention for Women Techies:

If you are women involved in technology with any of the Google products, you have got one more special community to join and explore more. That is WTM - Women Tech Makers. WTM itself has more and more special groups, scholarship programs and events to collaborate and grow. Above mentioned sources are adapted by me throughout my career of learning and updating my Android skills. Every time I need information on Android, I end up finding a solution in one of the above-mentioned sources. Sometimes I wondered how many places that Google makes the Android developer’s materials available. Finally, I decided to list them out and spread it to the community. As a result, I made this blog post.

Please comment any other sources that I missed mentioning here.

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