Learning Android, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Installing and Beginning Use of Android Tools

In this chapter, you will learn how to set up your environment for Android development. We’ll go beyond just listing where you can download the software, and will cover some of the best practices in getting set up. We’ll look at choices for development operating systems as well as the Android tools available. You will see the good, the bad, and the ugly of the various tool and platform choices that you’re about to make (or that someone else has already made for you).

By the end of this chapter, you will have your entire development environment set up. You’ll be able to write a Hello World application, build it, and run it on the emulator (or a physical device, if you want).

Note

We use ~ to refer to your home directory. On Mac OS X, that’s typically something like /Users/marko. On Linux, it would be /home/marko, on Windows Vista and 7, it would be C:\Users\marko, and on Windows XP it would be C:\Documents and Settings\marko. To keep things simple and consistent, we’re going to use Unix-style forward slashes and not Windows backslashes to denote file path separators.

So, if you’re on Windows, just change ~ to C:\Users\ YourUserName and / to \. Other than that, everything should be pretty much the same for different operating systems, regardless of whether you use OS X, Linux, or Windows.

Installing Java Development Kit

Android development is based on Java language, tools, and libraries. So one of the first requirements is that you ...