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

More advanced persistence


Let's think about what we need to do. We want to save a bunch of notes to the internal storage. Being more specific, we want to store a selection of Strings and related Boolean values. These Strings and Boolean values represent the user's note title, the note's text, and whether it is a to-do, important, or idea.

Given what we already know about the SharedPreferences class, at first glance, this might not seem especially challenging – until we dig a little deeper into our requirements. What if the user loves our app and ends up with 100 notes? We would need 100 identifiers for key-value pairs. Not impossible, but it would start to get awkward.

Now, consider that we want to enhance the app and give the user the ability to add dates to them. Android has a Date class, which is perfect for this. It would be reasonably straightforward to then add neat features such as reminders to our app. But when it comes to saving data, suddenly, things start to get complicated.

How...