title: Adding Support Libraries to Android project
body: <p>Why am I having such a hard time getting into the swing of Android development? I've been developing in various languages over the years and, for some reason, just can't seem to get beyond that "jeez-i-still-feel-a-total-noob" stage with Android.</p>
  
  <p>So I'm trying to add an Action Bar to my Android 2.3.3 project. No problem, right? The Android developers website has a nice and clear article explaining exactly how to do it. Of course it involves adding the appcompat v7 support library. No problem, even this is documented step-by-step on <a href="http://developer.android.com/tools/support-library/setup.html" rel="noreferrer">this page</a>. But, as with just about every such exercise in Android, I find that you can do exactly what the page tells you to do, it still won't work without significant amount of Googling to fix the errors that you encounter afterwards.</p>
  
  <p>So I've followed the steps under "Using Eclipse" in the section "Adding libraries with resources" in the above link. The first error I get is <strong>Unable to resolve target 'android-16'</strong>. No problem, this one I could figure out for myself but I'm curious, is there anything in the documents I've been following that would have suggested to me that I need Android 4.1.2 (API16) installed? Did I just read right over it or should I have known by myself that, to do what I'm trying to do, I would need API16?</p>
  
  <p>Never mind, at least I can fix that but then I get a new problem. As soon as I add the android-support-v7-compat library to my project and click the OK button, the console output lights up with errors, the first one being:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>C:...\android-support-v7-appcompat\res\values-v14\styles_base.xml:24:
    error: Error retrieving parent for item: No resource found that
    matches the given name 'android:Widget.Holo.ActionBar'.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>and the other 60 odd errors are similar but for different given names.</p>
  
  <p>I would really appreciate if anyone could help me out here. Obviously I'd like to know how to solve this particular problem but if anyone could give me some tips on how to get past this very frustrating stage of learning this new development environment, I would be ever so thankful. What is it that I should have done differently not to run into these kinds of errors, other than following the instructions on the Android Developers website step by step?</p>