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

Expressing yourself demo app


Let's try using some declarations, assignments, and operators. When we bundle these elements together into some meaningful syntax, we call it an expression. So let's write a quick app to try some out. We will then use Toast and Log to check our results.

Create a new project called Expressing Yourself, use a Blank Activity, and leave all the other settings at their defaults. The completed code that we will write in this project can be found in the Chapter 7/Expressing Yourself folder of the download bundle.

Switch to the MainActivity tab in the editor and we will write some code. In the onCreate method, just before the closing curly brace }, add this code:

int numMessages;

Directly below the previous line of code we will assign a value to numMessages. But as you begin to type nu notice we get a little pop-up message like this:

If you look at the first option in the pop-up message it is in fact numMessages. Android Studio is offering to complete our typing for us. We...