Book Image

Learning Java by Building Android Games - Third Edition

By : John Horton
5 (1)
Book Image

Learning Java by Building Android Games - Third Edition

5 (1)
By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Android is one of the most popular mobile operating systems today. It uses the most popular programming language, Java, as one of the primary languages for building apps of all types. Unlike most other Android books, this book doesn’t assume that you have any prior knowledge of Java programming, instead helps you get started with building Android games as a beginner. This new, improved, and updated third edition of Learning Java by Building Android Games helps you to build Android games from scratch. Once you've got to grips with the fundamentals, the difficulty level increases steadily as you explore key Java topics, such as variables, loops, methods, object-oriented programming (OOP), and design patterns while working with up-to-date code and supporting examples. At each stage, you'll be able to test your understanding by implementing the concepts that you’ve learned to develop a game. Toward the end, you’ll build games such as Sub Hunter, Retro Pong, Bullet Hell, Classic Snake, and Scrolling Shooter. By the end of this Java book, you'll not only have a solid understanding of Java and Android basics but will also have developed five cool games for the Android platform.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)

Summary

The phone screen is still blank, but we have achieved our first output to the Logcat window. In addition, we have laid out the entire structure of the Sub' Hunter game. All we need to do now is learn more about Java, and then use it to add code to each of the methods.

In this chapter, we learned that Java methods are used to divide up the code into logical sections, each with a name. We don't know the full details of Java methods yet. However, if you understand that you can define methods and then execute them by calling them, then you know all you need to make further progress.

We also took a first glimpse at OOP. It doesn't matter whether OOP seems a little baffling at this stage. If you know that we can code a class and create usable objects in our code based on that class, then you know enough to continue.

In the next chapter, we will learn about our game's data, for example, how the game "remembers" values such as the position of the submarine or the size of the grid. We will learn that our data can take many forms but can generally be referred to as variables.