Lesson 0.1: What you need to become Android app developer (all for free)

To create your own simple Internet website all you need is a notepad (like standard Notepad preinstalled in Windows) and an Internet browser (like Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera) that for sure you also have in a computer. In the Notepad you write a code and in the browser you see results.

Don’t worry we will come back to Android soon, but a short “How to create a website” example would help us understand how to start.

These are steps needed to create very simple webpage just displaying a text.

Step 1: Open Notepad.

Step 2: Write some text, for instance: This is my page.

Just a plain text in Notepad is the simplest version of website

Step 3: Save a file as mypage.html. This is important that you add “.html” after file name. But don’t close Notepad yet.

Step 4: Double click the icon of file you have just created (a file would have associated browser icon).

The website icon on Desktop

Step 5: It opens in a browser and you can see your website (OK, just a text, but in a browser so it’s a website…).

You can see your very first website in a browser

Step 6: Modify slightly your text in Notepad by adding simple instruction <b> for a browser. The file content should look now:

Adding tag makes marked part bold

This <b></b> instruction means make a text bold. It has the beginning (<b>) and the end </b> (mind the “/”).

Step 7: Save the file and refresh or reopen it in the browser. Now part of our website (text) is bold.

The part of the website text became bold

We have just learnt that to create a computer program (or Internet website, or mobile app) we need a tool to write a code, have to know some instructions understandable by machine and have a tool to see/use a program. In the next lessons we will set an environment for creating Android apps and then we start to learn first instructions.