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

Real-world apps


So far, we have built a dozen or more apps of various complexity. Most were designed and tested on a phone.

Of course, in the real world, our apps need to work well on any device, and must be able to handle what happens when in either portrait or landscape view (on all devices).

Furthermore, it is often not enough for our apps to just work and look "OK" on different devices. Often, our apps will need to behave differently and appear with a significantly different UI based on whether the device is a phone, a tablet, or has landscape/portrait orientation.

Note

Android supports apps for large screen TVs, smart watches via the wear API, virtual and augmented reality, and "things" for the internet of things. We will not be covering the latter two aspects in this book, but by the end of it, it is the author's hope that you will be sufficiently prepared to venture into these topics should you choose to.

Look at the following screenshot of the BBC News app running on an Android phone...