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)

Switching to make decisions

We have seen the vast and virtually limitless possibilities of combining the Java operators with if and else statements. But sometimes, a decision in Java can be made better in other ways.

When we must decide based on a clear list of possibilities that don't involve complex combinations, then switch is usually the way to go.

We start a switch decision like this:

switch(argument){
}

In the previous example, an argument could be an expression or a variable. Within the curly braces, {}, we can make decisions based on the argument with the case and break elements:

case x:
     // code to for case x
     break;
case y:
     // code for case y
     break;

In the previous example, you can see that each case states a possible result and that each break denotes the end of that case, as well as the point at which no further case statements will...