I'm finally finding out what all this Android stuff is about.  After two years of using an iPhone, I just picked up a Samsung Galaxy S II.  One of the things I was most excited bout when switching was learning to program for Android.  I had played around with some tutorials and basic apps using objective-C in Xcode, but the real barrier was the $100 buy in to become an Apple Developer and put those programs on my device.  I'm happy to report that for Android, the process is much more simple and best of all: Free!

The best way to start is by following the instructions available here: http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html .  The whole process was pretty straightforward and I only had trouble when installing the Eclipse ADT plugin.  The issue was a URL in the software sources for Eclipse had the name of the old version instead of the newest (Indigo, 3.7).  Renaming the URL solved the problem and the few other minor errors were easily solved using Google. The obvious first task when programming for a new language or device is to get a "hello world" of some kind running.  Google is very helpful in this respect and have a great into to starting a project and how Android apps generally work: http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world.html.  

The program was easily tested in a AVD (Android Vitrual Device). The key difference between my experiments in iOS and Android programming is how easy it was to move this simple program right onto my device.  Google provides very straightforward instructions that worked on the first try: http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/device.html#setting-up I hope these links helped anybody just getting starting with Android programming.  Have Fun!