Welcome to app development with Ruboto!

One of my primary focuses in these tutorials is to set you free, give you wings of your own! When we are through here, I want you to be able to build any app you can dream of. That means I've got to get you using the Android API Guides and Reference like a pro.

In these tutorials, I'm going to spend some time teaching you how to understand these guides and convert them into Ruboto. If you're already familiar with the Android API, or the Java programming language, then some of this might seem a little tedious because I'm going to assume you are like me: completely unfamiliar with Java, and new to the Android APIs.

If you get hung-up anywhere just go checkout the example apps over in the github repo for this site. I wrote them to test that these tutorials do what I say they do so you can use them as a guide.

Guides vs Reference

Before I go further, I want to be clear that when I say the "guides" I mean these and when I say the API "reference" or docs I mean this.

They are different things! If you'll explore those two pages for a bit, you'll see that they have different but related purposes.

If learning Android development is like traveling to a foreign country, the guides are written to help familiarize you with Android culture, philosophy, and language. It's expected that you'll peruse them before you get on the plane and continue to read them while there. On the other hand, the reference is meant to be your pocket dictionary, ready at hand if you should find yourself surrounded by hostile natives, or worse, unsure of how to order your eggs!

So please spend a little time with these invaluable resources both now and as we go along!