Summary

The Android development environment can be a bit intimidating at times. Luckily, you need only a subset of the available options to get started, and the last few pages of this chapter should have given you enough information to get started with some basic coding.

The big lesson to take away from this chapter is how the pieces fit together. The JDK and the Android SDK provide the basis for all Android development. They offer the tools to compile, deploy, and run applications on emulator instances and devices. To speed up development, we use Eclipse along with the ADT plug-in, which does all the hard work we'd otherwise have to do on the command line with the JDK and SDK tools. Eclipse itself is built on a few core concepts: workspaces, which manage projects; views, which provide specific functionality, such as source editing or LogCat output; perspectives, which tie together views for specific tasks such as debugging; and Run and Debug configurations, which allow you to specify the startup settings used when you run or debug applications.

The secret to mastering all this is practice, as dull as that may sound. Throughout the book, we'll implement several projects that should make you more comfortable with the Android development environment. At the end of the day, though, it is up to you to take it all one step further.

With all this information, you can move on to the reason you're reading this book in the first place: developing games.