The ADT bundle doesn't install documentation by default, therefore the only way to read it is by using a internet connection. Here I'll describe how to acquire that documentation for reading it locally.
First off, be sure to launch your Eclipse IDE as computer administrator. (The details about how to do that are a little bit OT here, anyway... if you start Eclipse using a shortcut in Windows 7, be sure that, after opening its property, the item Run this program as an administrator is checked on under the tab Compatibility).
Now open your Eclipse IDE, then from Windows menu, choose the item Android SDK Manager. A window similar to the one in figure will open up.
Here you can see what already has been installed locally and what still hasn't. Check the item Documentation for Android SDK then click on Install button.
After installing the documentation, you can browse it under docs folder, located into SDK root folder. The entry point is the file offline.html.
Right now I'm doing some experimentations with Eclipse IDE using Java, but... wait a moment: is this the JVM I'm used to program for desktop/server applications?
Well... no. Take a look here to get what Dalvik is and here for getting some basic differences from JVM.
This is day 2 of my experience in building my own Android app.
I downloaded the whole ADT bundle for Windows here and I installed it.
Then I started my training by chapter one, Building Your First App, that's basically an Hello World app.
This is a quite easy app to develop that shows you some basic concepts behind Android development: the Activity class, the View class and the Intent class. Beside that, it helps you familiarize with the emulator and its usage for building, running and debugging apps.
My impression now is... there is a lot of things to study and the complexity is high because the field is huge and this platform suffers fragmentation: I mean you cannot rely on the fact your app will run on Jelly Beans only (at least for my app). Therefore some APIs cannot be used generally and you have to learn way A as well B to do just the same thing.
Before continuing my training, I discovered a site where Open Source Android app are listed: it can be useful for doing some practice by studying already-skilled-programmers' code. Here it is: F-Droid. This site, as well as the SDK samples, can help a lot. (Practice makes perfect).
