If you're already a java developer, you should probably be able to jump in just from the official docs: http://developer.android.com/guide/index.html http://dev

If you're already a java developer, you should probably be able to jump in just from the official docs: http://developer.android.com/guide/index.html http://developer.android.com/guide/index.html Follow along with the tutorials, then download some of the sample apps to work with. I've also found that downloading the source code to the Android project itself is pretty worthwhile. You can look at the source to almost all of the apps included in a default installation (dialer, camera, music, browser, etc.) Last I checked, most of the books are being outdated pretty fast. Don't even bother with any book that doesn't cover 2.0 at least, 2.1 preferably. For most apps, covering the broad range of devices isn't very difficult. The emulator that comes with the SDK will let you emulate different display resolutions. You can also run any version of the Android OS on the emulator to test your app under different OS versions. The "unholy mixture of XML and GridBagLayout" is actually pretty easy if you've ever worked with an HTML CSS grid framework like Blueprint, 360Grid, or YUI grid. At least, it's made pretty good sense to me so far. It would be nice if there was a good visual layout tool available... but oh well. I'm not aware of a CoreData like high level persistence framework. App data storage is usually done with the built in SQlite libraries. I believe you're on your own so far in building higher level abstractions on top of that.