Installing Android Studio will take a long time and use up a lot of space. Be patient. The first time you run Android Studio, it will download a bunch of stuff. You may get a message that tells you some resource wasn’t installed and then asks you whether you want to retry. In my experience, retrying will succeed.

Once you have successfully created and tested your first Android application, I suggest that you do not update Android Studio or any of the SDK tools for the duration of this course. Updates sometimes break an AVD or change something that breaks your existing projects.

In this chapter, we pretty much punt our way through the XML parts of a basic Android Project. We’ll use Android’s XML configuration files to a greater extent in subsequent chapters. You don’t need to be an XML expert to write the XML parts of an Android project; but you do need basic XML knowledge.

If you are brand new to XML and want a crash course in it, here are some resources for you to look into:

• W3School’s XML tutorial, Introduction through Attributes.
• A reasonable tutorial 🎥 by Mark Lassof:
  

It might help you to know that XML was originally developed for use with Web technologies. It has since been adopted for use in many different situations. It’s particularly popular in Java culture.

When you are done with a project and/or want to start a new one, you can close your project from the menu bar: File > Close project. This will close your project and show you the Android Studio welcome screen. From here you can re-open a project or create a new one.