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

The structure of Java code – revisited


We have already seen that each time we create a new Android project we also create a new Java package, as a kind of container for the code we will write.

We have also learned about and played around with classes. We have imported and taken direct advantage of classes from the Android API such as Log and Toast. We have also used the AppCompatActivity class, but in a different manner to that of Log and Toast. You might remember the first line of code in all our projects so far, after the import statements, used the extends keyword:

public class MyActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

When we extend a class as opposed to just importing it, we are kind of making it our own. In fact, if you take another look at the line of code you can see that we are making a new class, with a new name, MyActivity, but basing it on the AppCompatActivity class from the Android API.

Note

AppCompatActivity is a slightly modified version of Activity. It basically provides extra...