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

Building an image gallery/slider app


Create a new project in Android Studio called Image Pager. Use the Basic Activity template and leave the remainder of the settings at their defaults.

The images are located in the download bundle in the Chapter 25/Image Pager/drawable folder. The following diagram shows them in Windows Explorer:

Add the images to the drawable folder in the project explorer or, of course, you could add more interesting images, perhaps some photos you have taken.

Implementing the layout

For a simple image paging app, we use the PagerAdapter class. We can think of this as being like RecyclerApater, but for images, as it will handle the display of an array of images in a ViewPager widget. This is much like how RecyclerAdapter handles the display of the content of an ArrayList in a ListView. All we need to do is override the appropriate methods.

To implement an image gallery with PagerAdapter, we first need a ViewPager in our main layout. So you can see precisely what is required...