Course of Study

I've reached a new point in my studies. I'm pretty much done with all the resources I had intended on using to learn from, so I haven't got as much structure as I've had for the past few months. This is both exciting and a little scary. I'm going to spend the next months primarily making my own apps. My original idea was an app every day, but that's just not feasible, especially as my apps get more complicated, and even with ones that aren't all that complicated, I run into issues that sometimes take hours to solve. So I'm just going to do my best to challenge myself, and make as much as I can.

I'm still going to be spending a bit of my time studying: 

• I'm going through Derek Bana's excellent series of Android tutorials, which hopefully I'll be done with by next week. 

• I went through the Getting Started section of the Android Developer's Guide this week. I though I might go through the whole guide, but this first section has put me off that idea. It's more informational than instructional. If what it covers isn't related to something I'm actually doing, the lessons probably aren't going to stick. It's a great resource though, that I'm sure I'll be coming back to a lot, as I need it.

• I found a great MOOC from the University of Maryland on Coursera. It's introductory, but it's really helping me. It goes into great detail on concepts that I understood in the context of what I was doing before, but maybe didn't wholly understand. I'm finding now that my knowledge is a bit more advanced, going over introductory topics is helping me connect the dots with more complex Android concepts. 

• I'm also doing a Kilobolt tutorial that's guiding me through recreating flappy bird with libGDX. I've got some interest in making a game of my own, so playing around with that framework has been really fun. 

• Another thing I'd like to do is get through one or two more Udacity courses. They're really good, but I sort of hit a wall with them this month, so I'm hoping, now that I know a little more about the things that I stumbled on (Database and Testing), I'll do better with the material.

• And, when I can find time, I'm still chipping away at the javascript exercises on freecodecamp. This is probably weird to say, but I just find javascript tantalizing. It's so powerful and versatile, and seemingly everywhere. Definitely something I'd like to add to my skillset.