Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By : John Horton, Paresh Mayani
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By: John Horton, Paresh Mayani

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular OS in the world. There are millions of devices accessing tens of thousands of applications. It is many people's entry point into the world of technology; it is an operating system for everyone. Despite this, the entry-fee to actually make Android applications is usually a computer science degree, or five years’ worth of Java experience. Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android applications from scratch—whether you’re looking to start your programming career, make an application for work, be reintroduced to mobile development, or are just looking to program for fun. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the Java basics to working with the Android API. All examples are created from within Android Studio, the official Android development environment that helps supercharge your application development process. After this crash-course, we’ll dive deeper into Android programming and you’ll learn how to create applications with a professional-standard UI through fragments, make location-aware apps with Google Maps integration, and store your user’s data with SQLite. In addition, you’ll see how to make your apps multilingual, capture images from a device’s camera, and work with graphics, sound, and animations too. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to start building your own custom applications in Android and Java.
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Fragments


Fragments will likely become a staple of almost every real app you make. They are so useful; there are so many reasons to use them; and once you get used to them, they are so simple. There is almost no reason not to use them.

Fragments are reusable elements of an app just like any class, but as mentioned previously, they have special features, such as the ability to load their own view as well as having their very own lifecycle methods that make them perfect to achieve the goals that we've discussed in the Real-world apps section.

Let's dig a bit deeper into Fragments one feature at a time.

Fragments have a lifecycle too

We can set up and control Fragments very much like we do Activities, by overriding the appropriate lifecycle methods.

onCreate

In the onCreate method, we can initialize variables and do almost all the things we would typically do in the Activity onCreate method. The big exception to this is initializing our UI.

onCreateView

In this method, we will, as the name suggests...