Hey crew.I love treehouse but...

Why so? =)

You might be right, you won't be a pro because you did Treehouse, you will need practice(trial and error my friend), and if you need help their is always Google and the Treehouse forums. Remember, only a small minority are able to do something right off the bat when they are done reading or watching videos about it and have never done it before, for the rest of us it's lots of practice.

What makes you think this?

It sounds as if you're trying to get reassurance as in, perhaps you're a little intimidated by how much there is to learn. Down right terrified even? But that's ok. Everyone gets that the first moment it hits them. The first moment they really take a look inside a track and then all the courses and stages. It can be mind boggling and if anyone told me "nope, never, I knew exactly what it would take and I was never once taken aback by how much I need to learn" I would stand back in preparation for their trousers combusting spontaneously (sidenote: combusting is not accepted by spell check.)

Perhaps you've come to grips with the long road ahead of you though and your true fear is in regard to your ability. Well, the plain fact is that no, you won't be releasing apps the day you finish the track, whenever that may be. But, you WILL have the knowledge about how to do it.

I haven't really given the Android track a thorough once over before but I just did and man, they have everything you need in there. They teach you the fundamentals of the language the apps are coded in, they walk you through - what? - 4 projects?? And in those projects is where they introduce some of the core programming fundamentals (conditionals, loops, etc..) They have a course on the actual design(aesthetics) of your app, they go over how to test and debug, refactoring, error handling, the process of publishing your app so folks can buy it, etc..etc..

Frankly, I'm amazed at the depth of it as I've never really given it a look and if I wasn't already in the process of developing some desktop apps (and if there were a market for my desktop apps to BE mobile apps) I'd probably go start learning it.

But here's the catch...

Will you be able to code and publish an android app? Yes.

Will you want to? Yes.

Will you? No

Why?

Because you're going to suck. Your apps are going to suck. And you wouldn't want them up on the app store anyway.

Seriously. It's just the way it goes. You're going to suck. You'll suck for a while but that's ok, because eventually, the suck goes away. (I think I found my new tag line. SAID HERE FIRST 03/13/15)

As Caleb Kleveter (there're a lot of Calebs on here) pointed out, you need to practice and you're going to realized that the ideas that you have in your head are going to require that you learn more about the language(maybe just a little, maybe a lot. It depends on the size of the ideas you've got.(omg I'm on a role!)). But the track that you're taking will have prepared you for being able to go out and learn whatever else you need to learn own your own. That's why they cover the tools and documentations so much on here. It's important. And to be a programmer or designer is akin to being a doctor or lawyer (YEAH I SAID IT) in the fact that you CONSTANTLY have to go and refer to the research and literature that pertains to your field. Doctors have medical journals and studies, lawyers have case law and all manners of books and references they constantly have to refer to...and coders? We have API documentation and StackOverflow lol.

Even the guys out there that do this stuff professionally pretty much have one separate window open that consists of all their favorite resources, documentation and communities. Like, constantly. I'm sure most have just set something up to open all that stuff up when they log on they use it so much.

And the teachers here at TTH do a pretty good job of constantly reminding you that hey... you're gonna need this documentation because even the pros constantly refer to it. Like, every day. All the time. In fact I'd go so far as to say that what separates the pros from the ones trying to be pro's is their ability to use the documentation and other resource gems (communities, blogs, snippet and repo sites) to quickly find what they need. .

So if you previously thought that you'd finish the track and be able to bust out android apps that are gonna take the market by storm and in a year you'll be retired and living in the Caribbean, then you're right to be worried about that not being the case. But if you just think that you'll get to the end of the course and won't be able to do anything than you're sadly mistaken. This place is ridiculously thorough in what they teach you and brother, you're gonna have an entirely awesome new skill set for sure... but that skill set will still be a blunt butter knife compared to where you want to be. Now it's up to you to sharpen that into a deadly kriss because it's a free market out there and you're up against the pros. But you CAN do it.

Suck. Practice. Fail. Suck some more, practice some more. Repeat. Create every day and eventually, before you know it, you don't suck and quite possibly actually pretty good.

So hang in there and plug along. I wish you all the best my friend,

Cheers,

Huck -

I know i have to practice and i wasnt thinking of releasing game/app yet.I just dont know where to learn after treehouse.