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 basic classes mini app


The generals who will be using our app will need more than one Soldier object. In our app that we are about to build, we will instantiate and use multiple objects. We will also demonstrate using the dot operator on variables and methods to show that different objects have their very own instance variables.

You can get the completed code for this example in the code download. It is in the chapter 9/Basic Classes folder. Alternatively, read on to create your own working example.

Create a project with a blank activity. Call the application BasicClasses. Now, we create a new class called Soldier:

  1. Right-click the com.gamecodeschool.basicclasses (or whatever your package name is) folder in the project explorer window.

  2. Select New | Java Class.

  3. In the Name field, type Soldier and left-click on OK.

The new class is created for us with a code template ready to put our implementation within it, just like the next image shows:

Notice that Android Studio has put the class in the same...