Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition

By : John Horton
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition

By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Are you trying to start a career in programming, but haven't found the right way in? Do you have a great idea for an app, but don't know how to make it a reality? Or maybe you're just frustrated that in order to learn Android, you must know Java. If so, then this book is for you. This new and expanded second edition of Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android Pie applications from scratch. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the basics of Java to working with the Android API. All examples use the up-to-date API classes, and 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 and store your user's data with SQLite. In addition, you'll see how to make your apps multilingual, draw to the screen with a finger, 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 (35 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Widget exploration app


We have just talked about six Widgets – the EditText, ImageView, RadioButton (and RadioGroup), Switch, CheckBox, and TextClock widgets. Let's make a working app and do something real with each of them. We will also use a Button and a TextView again as well.

In this layout, we will use LinearLayout as the layout type that holds everything, and within LinearLayout, we will use multiple RelativeLayout.

RelativeLayout has been superseded by ConstraintLayout, but they are still very commonly used and well worth playing around with. You will see as you build layouts within RelativeLayout that the UI elements behave very much the same as ConstraintLayout but that the underlying XML is different. It is not necessary to learn this XML in detail, rather, using RelativeLayout will allow us to show the neat way Android Studio enables you to convert these layouts to ConstraintLayout.

Remember that you can refer to the completed code in the download bundle. This app can be found...