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

A simple mini-app array example


Let's make a simple working array example. You can get the completed code for this project in the downloadable code bundle. It can be found in the Chapter15/Simple Array Example/MainActivity.kt file.

Create a project with an Empty Activity project template and call it Simple Array Example.

First, we declare our array, allocate five spaces, and initialize values to each of the elements. Then, we output each of the values to the logcat window.

This is slightly different to the earlier examples that we have seen because we declare the size at the same time as we declare the array itself.

Add the following code to the onCreate function just after the call to setContentView:

// Declaring an array
// Allocate memory for a maximum size of 5 elements
val ourArray = IntArray(5)

// Initialize ourArray with values
// The values are arbitrary, but they must be Int
// The indexes are not arbitrary. Use 0 through 4 or crash!

ourArray[0] = 25
ourArray[1] = 50
ourArray[2] =...