Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

By : John Horton
5 (1)
Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

5 (1)
By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world and Kotlin has been declared by Google as a first-class programming language to build Android apps. With the imminent arrival of the most anticipated Android update, Android 10 (Q), this book gets you started building apps compatible with the latest version of Android. It adopts a project-style approach, where we focus on teaching the fundamentals of Android app development and the essentials of Kotlin by building three real-world apps and more than a dozen mini-apps. The book begins by giving you a strong grasp of how Kotlin and Android work together before gradually moving onto exploring the various Android APIs for building stunning apps for Android with ease. You will learn to make your apps more presentable using different layouts. You will dive deep into Kotlin programming concepts such as variables, functions, data structures, Object-Oriented code, and how to connect your Kotlin code to the UI. You will learn to add multilingual text so that your app is accessible to millions of more potential users. You will learn how animation, graphics, and sound effects work and are implemented in your Android app. By the end of the book, you will have sound knowledge about significant Kotlin programming concepts and start building your own fully featured Android apps.
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners
Contributors
Preface
Index

The Note to self app


Welcome to the first of the multi-chapter apps that we will implement in this book. When we do these projects, we will do them more professionally than we do the smaller apps. In this project, we will use String resources instead of hardcoding the text in the layouts.

Sometimes, these things can be overkill when you are trying to learn a new Android or Kotlin topic, but they are useful and important to start using as soon as possible in real projects. They soon become like second nature and the quality of our apps will benefit from it.

Using String resources

In Chapter 3, Exploring Android Studio and the Project Structure, we discussed using String resources instead of hardcoding text in our layout files. There were a few benefits of doing things this way, but it was also slightly long-winded.

As this is our first multi-chapter project, it is a good time to do things the right way. If you want a quick refresher on the benefits of String resources, refer back to Chapter...