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

Improving our app and deploying again


We will take a more thorough and structured look at Android Studio, in particular the visual designer in the next chapter. For now, I thought it would be good to make a small addition to our UI, as well as write our first few lines of Java code.

Tip

You can get the completed code files for this project in the Chapter 2 folder of the download bundle.

In Android, there are often multiple ways to get the same thing done. Here, we will see how we can refer to a method in our Java code directly from the UI designer or XML code. Then, once we have done this, we will jump to the Java code and write our very own methods that our new UI refers to. Not only that, but we will write code within our methods that both gives an output on the logcat/console and uses a really cool Android feature that pops up a message to the user.

Modifying the UI

Here, we will add a couple of buttons to the screen and we will then see a really fast way to make them actually do something...