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

Writing our first Kotlin code


So, we now know the code that will output to logcat or the user's screen. However, where do we put the code? To answer this question, we need to understand that the onCreate function in MainActivity.kt executes as the app is preparing to be shown to the user. So, if we put our code at the end of this function, it will run just as the user sees it; that sounds good.

Note

We know that to execute the code in a function, we need to call it. We have wired our buttons up to call a couple of functions, such as topClick and bottomClick. Soon, we will write these functions. But who or what is calling onCreate? The answer to this mystery is that Android itself calls onCreate in response to the user clicking on the app icon to run the app. In Chapter 6, The Android Lifecycle, we will look deeper, and it will be clear what exactly the code executes and when. You don't need to completely comprehend this now; I just wanted to give you an overview of what was going on.

Let's...