I’ve you’ve been interested in making your own Android apps but fancied yourself more as a visual learner, then fret not. Udacity, who has been expanding its courses and presence on Android, is providing a free Android development track that will get you started in making that next big blockbuster app or, if you really must, the next Flappy Bird phenomenon.

Udacity and Coursera are just some of the big names in the budding online or distance learning industry, offering courses in varying fields, ranging from computer science to humanities to sciences. Most of them are offered for free but some, like Udacity, offer perks and advantagees if you pay a fee, including personalized coaching and a verified certificate you can flaunt.

Late last month, Udacity launched its mobile app on Android and with it came the announcement of new courses that catered specifically to our little green friend. Now Google is announcing the courses from its end, particularly the Android Fundamentals package. The course videos feature Google Developer Advocates and cover a wide range of basic topics, starting with the history of the Android platform. Of course, Google would prefer you go to Android’s official documents and guides for reference, but this course will definitely help in making the whole learning process look a little less daunting.

This Udacity course is available for free, complete with all the videos and course materials you will need, but, as mentioned, there is also an option to pay a subscription fee for access to more features. One caveat about the course. Although it caters to those completely new to Android or even mobile app development, it does require a bit of familiarity with programming, particularly with Java. If you don’t have those creds however, worry not. Yes, Udacity has you covered there, too.

SOURCE: Google, Udacity

4 COMMENTS

  1. — Sebastian Thrun, Udacity Co-founder, had collateralled with a criminal suspect named gabriele scheler in a series of fascism crimes starting from a Stanford campus atrocity case — Stanford police case number: IR #04-111-0335;Victim: Peter Cao; Criminal Suspect: Gabriele Scheler] —http://t dot cn/SXQ6Rj (replace ‘dot’ with . to get the right web address) — attention to the 7 photo evidence to see how cruel people from this fascism circle are —, which led to the tragic death of an innocent Asian Stanford student, Thrun is not innocent in an unsuccessful plotted murder on me either and I have been cursed by fascism powers from Sebastian Thrun and Gabriele Scheler’s side for many years.

    — There is actually a war between fascism and anti-fascism, at this stage, fascism still prevails in our lives; Sebastian Thrun and Gabriele Scheler are just front figures we could see in a fascism circle, there is a whole pack of fascists behind them to cover up their crimes and to retaliate on victims

    • Answer to nontraditional001′s comment — “you might have a stronger argument if your cut back on the crazy” — from http://t dot cn/RvFierc
      ====================================
      Dear nontraditional001,

      Appreciate that you’ve found some crazy issue here and thank you for your opinion;

      It is a tough task to challenge those fascists, which might make it look crazy;

      However, wouldn’t one agree that those bloody stripes on my legs in those 7 photo evidence are out of a crazy crime scene —http://t dot cn/SXQ6Rj — a harsh reality?

      Also, such a simple campus atrocity case with clear evidence and serious police investigation had been purposefully mystified later on, in favor of this criminal suspect Gabriele Scheler, by some judicial officers (namely ZZZ/YYY/VVV, etc.) who hided their identities from me for over 10 years, and this case had therefore induced more and more retaliatory fascism crimes; though I am a victim, my life has been underhandedly cursed by fascism powers behind Sebastian Thrun and Gabriele Scheler for these many years — what’s really going on here? — isn’t this fact much crazier?

      — One may find those things in my statements crazy to learn, but they are no more than facts; I am not the one who did crazy things, those fascists behind Sebastian Thrun and Gabriele Scheler did;

    • Answer to nontraditional001′s comment — “not convincing at all”—from http://t dot cn/RvFierc

      ============================

      Dear Sir/Ms nontraditional001,

      Well, I bet there is at least a convincing police case number to start with:[Stanford police case number: IR #04-111-0335;Victim: Peter Cao; Criminal Suspect: Gabriele Scheler] — do you have any problem with that? Would you dare deny the brutality from Gabriele Scheler on my body as evidenced in those 7 photos?— http://t dot cn/SXQ6Rj —

      If you want to have some credibility here, please show us your real identity in the first place;

      We are all made of human beings; you have your judgement, and we all have our own; Anybody with normal intelligence could easily figure out that there is something seriously wrong going on in this case; Would you be specific which part in my argument is ‘not convincing at all’? on what identity do you speak, after all?

      Your personal opinion out of a simple and arrogant argument of ‘not convincing at all’, under an insincerely disguised user name, are problems that make yourself ‘not convincing’ to anyone ‘at all’;

      — Would you please show us your real identity? I am eager to learn;

    • Regarding to a recent article on BusinessInsider — “The Inventor Of Google Glass Says It Could Outsource Our Brains” —

      — Sebastian Thrun of Udacity co-founder is not the Google Glass Inventor; Here is a comment from an insider (not me) about Sebastian Thrun and the google glass technology which Thrun claimed to be its inventor

      ————————————–

      Thrun is shamelessly taking credit for work done by others. In Germany, his native country, prof. Dickmanns already had fully autonomous, fast, self-driving cars (160km/h) in traffic in 1995, long before anybody else, and 10 years before Thrun’s team joined the fray by participating in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge for self-driving cars. And the DARPA objectives were not that hard to achieve, as quite a few teams were able to reach the goal. One of them was a financial services company that had never dabbled in robotics before. All of this is easy to verify. Or take the online courses of Udacity. In Germany, prof. Loviscach started online university lectures back in 2009, and got millions of clicks long before Thrun jumped on the train 3 years later. The award-winning prof. Vornberger published his popular videos already in 2002, even before the Khan Academy, currently the most visible mass education outfit. (Germany has a long tradition of distance teaching – Univ. Hagen with over 80,000 remote students has specialized on this for decades.) Even at Stanford, Thrun was not the first. His colleague prof. Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera, got hundreds of thousands of viewers for his youtube machine learning course, long before Thrun followed suit and put his own lecture online. Or take Google Glass. No wonder that prof. Babak Parviz, its creator, got miffed when Thrun started taking credit for that as well. More examples from Academia could be listed. If there is one recurring theme in Thrun’s carreer, it’s his (more or less subtle) attempts at festooning himself with achievements of others.

      P.S.

      Thrun was privileged by some tycoons in science field to take credit for works done by others; e.g., the person who had made primary contribution to the self-driving car project which built-up fame for Thrun, is a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, but his name disappeared later on while Thrun takes all the credit for the self-driving car project;

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