Your reading for this week is about Activities and Intents.

You have the choice of the textbooks, the Android Developer Guide, and
the Android Reference. The best strategy is to combine them according
to what best works for your learning style. The purpose of this note
is to orient you and help you work out your own strategy.

----------[ Android Developer Guide and Android Reference ]----------

The official Android documentation offers _two_ kinds of resources:
the Reference and the Developer Guide. As you google for a class
or method name, you can see in the URL which kind of hit you got:

https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/index.html -- Guide

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html -- Reference

The Guide is probably best to read first, because it is written as a
continuous story, with diagrams and code examples. For instance, the
section on Activity comprises several subsections:

https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/intro-activities.html
https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/activity-lifecycle.html
https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/state-changes.html
...

and similarly the Guide section on Intent reads more like a book chapter,
also with diagrams and code:

https://developer.android.com/guide/components/intents-filters.html

The Guide, then, gives you an overview of the concept, but may skip
some details. For those, you need the Reference.

The Reference is more terse, but enumerates the full range of objects
and methods, together---most importantly---with their inheritance from
other objects.

For example, this reference on Intents
 https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent.html
enumerates a lot of Intents (whereas the Guide talks about how they
are filtered and mapped, what makes an intent implicit vs explicit, etc.) 

----------[ Textbooks and Tutorials ]----------

Depending on your learning style, it may be better for you to start
with reading an example of a minimal working app with some
explanations before you go to the Guide and the Reference.  That way
you may form some working guesses about how things work without
getting distracted by all the detail in the Guide or References.

-- "Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development" (https://commonsware.com/Android/)
comes with huge number of examples at https://github.com/commonsguy/cw-omnibus

These examples range from really simple (e.g., how to start a web browser
from an activity, https://github.com/commonsguy/cw-omnibus/blob/master/Activities/LaunchWeb/app/src/main/java/com/commonsware/android/activities/LaunchDemo.java)
to those that fetch and display weather forecasts from the National
Weather Service based on the current GPS location (https://github.com/commonsguy/cw-omnibus/tree/master/Location/Classic).

-- "Beginning Android Programming" also has a code download page:
http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/Beginning-Android-Programming-with-Android-Studio-4th-Edition.productCd-1118705599,descCd-DOWNLOAD.html

Opening project directories with Android Studio will probably not
work, as Gradle has moved on significantly, and matching the older
Gradle configuration is neither needed nor likely to work
out. Instead, create a new project (with all-new Gradle configs) and
then edit and add XML and Java files as needed.

-- "The Big Nerd Ranch Guide" has its code examples at
     https://www.bignerdranch.com/solutions/AndroidProgramming.zip

These examples are broken down into 36 chapters, but the same project
may be used across chapters as features are added to it.

Personally, I find "Beginning Android" examples and explanations
to be the most concise.