Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By : John Horton, Paresh Mayani
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By: John Horton, Paresh Mayani

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular OS in the world. There are millions of devices accessing tens of thousands of applications. It is many people's entry point into the world of technology; it is an operating system for everyone. Despite this, the entry-fee to actually make Android applications is usually a computer science degree, or five years’ worth of Java experience. Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android applications from scratch—whether you’re looking to start your programming career, make an application for work, be reintroduced to mobile development, or are just looking to program for fun. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the Java basics to working with the Android API. All examples are created from within Android Studio, the official Android development environment that helps supercharge your application development process. After this crash-course, we’ll dive deeper into Android programming and you’ll learn how to create applications with a professional-standard UI through fragments, make location-aware apps with Google Maps integration, and store your user’s data with SQLite. In addition, you’ll see how to make your apps multilingual, capture images from a device’s camera, and work with graphics, sound, and animations too. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to start building your own custom applications in Android and Java.
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Exploring the palette


Let's take a whirlwind tour of some of the previously unexplored items from the palette, and then we can drag a bunch of them onto a layout and see some of the methods they have that might be useful. We can then implement a mini project to put them all to use.

We have already explored Button and TextView in the last chapter. Let's take a closer look at a few more widgets.

EditText

The EditText widget does what its name suggests. If we make EditText available to our users, they will indeed be able to edit the text in it. We saw this in Chapter 5 Real-World Layouts, when we were designing a sign-up form. What we didn't see was how to capture the information from within it or where we would put this text-capturing code.

The next block of code assumes that we have declared an object of the EditText type and used it to get a reference to EditText in our XML layout. We might write code like the following for a button click, perhaps a submit button for a form, but it could also...