After setting up Eclipse and following the first basic Hello World tutorial, I moved on to learn a little bit more about programming for the Android platform.  I thought my next move would be to delve more into the Pure Data and Processing sketches from libpd, but it felt a bit like cheating to just exploit workarounds to use languages I already knew, rather than learn more about Android itself.

Google has a great set of tutorials for learning the objects and layout types available for creating simple android GUIs.  XML is used to layout exactly how GUIs are supposed to look and act.  After recently doing my resumé in LaTex, it seemed very straightforward after looking at the examples.  Anyone familiar with HTML or any other markup language should pick up pretty quickly.  

I also would like to point out that there is a graphical way to edit and build the GUI very similar to interface builder when programming for iPhone. The best way to learn is go through the tutorials, but also, try starting a new project and create an interface with a lot of random objects using the graphical tool.  Then, analyze and edit the resulting .xml file.  This helped me get a better hands on understanding of exactly what was happening.  Thanks to Google for having such great documentation!