The Complete Android Lollipop Development Course is a Programming Course by Tim Buchalka. It is currently taught by Tim on the Udemy platform.
Tim launched the course on the online learning platform about 3 months ago (in October/November 2014). He launched with a bold claim to write from scratch 6 apps from the usual 'Hello World' app right up to your own Youtube app.
This has now grown even more and the app count stands at a planned 14 apps! One being a Friends app which uses a database, this is right up my street!
The course is always updated and Lollipop is the current version of the Android OS which makes this course up to date and relevant.
Tim explains in his sales letter that Android is a massive market to create programs for with over 1 billion active Android users and millions more are activated each day. I was dubious of this claim so checked it out myself, he wasn't wrong! Android is massive and growing each day. I always thought that Apple was big, but its nothing compared to Android. When you think about these facts it stands to reason.
Apple have a handful of devices that use iOS whereas Android has thousands of devices and a huge number of companies that use the free OS. This does make the Android Marketplace a massive opportunity for anyone aspiring to create the next big app. Imagine selling just a £1 app to 1% of the market, thats £10,000,000! An awesome prospect and yet thousands of developers are creating apps each day trying to be the next Zenga (Candy Crush Saga).
Course Content
So moving on to Tims course, I am a subscriber and have been for a few weeks. I have completed about 50% of the course so far, and have built the 'Hello World' app and am just starting on a calculator app. This App teaches you button presses and 'toast', yes I said toast! Get the course and you will know what I mean, :). There are currently 169 lectures split into 20 sections with the average video lecture being 15 minutes. So far the quality has been excellent.
Tim is a native english speaker and although he has an accent to me (Im English and he is from Australia), it makes it kind of fun to listen to his accent. The lectures take the form of screencasts of Tims Mac where he codes the apps he is teaching you at that point. At the start of each app is a single intro slide during which Tim talks about what is coming up in the course.
Tim then guides you through each lecture to ensure that you have completed each vital step. When you get to the coding examples he encourages you to run Eclipse or Android Studio alongside the course. Tim then runs the code to ensure it compiles and outputs the correct content asking you to do the same. In the early lectures Tim talks you through installing Eclipse and the SDK's and then later Android Studio. Android Studio is the newer IDE to code android apps in.
So is the course worth it?
Well its taken me 1 month to get to this stage as I have been taking my time. I now have an intimate understanding of Android, Java and the Eclipse IDE. I now know how to download extra packages and run a virtual device or run test apps on my own personal Android devices. And the biggest thing is im only half way through the course! At less than $200 for over 24 hours of content, the course is a real bargin. The course in the end will contain 14 apps to code (with explanations) and the source code to download. It works out at a real steal, at only $8.30 an hour.
There are other Android courses on Udemy and hundreds if not thousands more on the internet. Having seen a few before this they can be a real minefiled, some are by non native speakers which makes learning hard to grasp and enjoy. Tim has in my opinion created the best Android Programming course on the market to date.
