I had hoped to be wrong about what working in a new platform would be like without access to internet resources, but it so far is going pretty much as expected. In other words, I find myself plundering the indices of the two Android books I own. My habit for skimming is proving to be a detriment rather than otherwise, simply because of the differences in the way books and internet information are (typically) organized. To some extent, I already appreciated this, but even a few hours of conscripting a motley platoon of bookmarks really brought the point home--and slammed the door behind it.
One thing that does surprise me, however, is how much mileage I'm getting from NetBean's auto-completion feature. It's not "Help" in the disturbing sense of Microsoft's much-despised "Clippy," or even so much the way a spreadsheet tries to guess what you're typing in a cell based on the values already there. Auto-completion in this case can be used to show you the classes within a package or the variables, constants and functions within a class. Which, given the fact that the books I'm using don't include a complete Android lexicon, is very useful.
That being said, the concept of learning to program from a mere book--whose examples may or may not address what I'm actually trying to accomplish--is pretty foreign now. I never, EVER want to go back to that world.
