I support Gorman on this.
Also I'm a programmer both for hobby and as a full time job (5 years from now) and my advice is: Read everything, learn everything, apply everything, smash everything.
Read everything: You should always keep in mind that a book wont help you with your problem, but it got that line, that phrase that may solve everything wrong with your current code, I'm not actually saying that you need to buy programming books (they're expensive as hell and don't pay much if you're not in a job), search for online content and don't mind reading everything on a site, even their labels, try to figure out which programming methods they used and then read about it, if you're really into android you could try that with your cellphone aswell by trying to figure out how is that app even working, it will help you creating a method to gather and store information, really helpful when you're in a huge project.
Learn everything: Maybe you think you don't need to know how to make the screen go pink, but that line of code could help you with other stuff, everytime you're programming and a logical problem comes in, your solution should come from what you know, if you know a lot, then you have a lot of options, don't mind learning little things, sometimes they're really handful. Also try to refresh yourself somehow often, technology is always updating so sit tight and try to see how things changed since you started with the "Hello World" thing.
Apply everything: When programming (or learning anything, for real) if you don't put your knowledge into use you have a huge chance to just forget it, that's it, it's gone and you won't be able to find out wtf was it. So if you learned how to draw a car in your app, do it, do it red, blue, green, do it upside down, check the possibilities and make that stick to your mind, it'll help lots further.
Smash everything: You're learning Android, its not that you should worry about your cellphone, build on it, it's a sandbox right in your hand, make things that you may need, an alarm, scheduler, maybe a handy app that holds other app, simple things, then you can go crazy on it.
That being said I would like to help you if you got any coding questions, PM me with any doubt and welcome to the Matrix.
Last edited by IIInsanEEE; Jan 13, 2015 at 11:29 AM.