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

Hashmaps


Kotlin HashMaps are interesting; they are a type of cousin to ArrayList. They encapsulate useful data storage techniques that would otherwise be quite technical for us to code successfully ourselves. It is worth looking at HashMap before getting back to the Note to self app.

Suppose that we want to store the data of lots of characters from a role-playing game and each different character is represented by an object of the Character type.

We could use some of the Kotlin tools that we already know about, such as arrays or ArrayList. However, with HashMap, we can give a unique key or identifier to each Character object, and access any such object using that same key or identifier.

Note

The term "hash" comes from the process of turning our chosen key or identifier into something used internally by the HashMap class. The process is called hashing.

Any of our Character instances can then be accessed with our chosen key or identifier. A good candidate for a key or identifier in the Character...