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

Global Positioning System


GPS is one of those technologies that never fails to amaze you when you sit and think about how it works. When you also consider that a phone you can put in your pocket is capable of using it too, it is even more mind-numbingly extraordinary.

Tip

Warning: If you were born after 1990, you might not understand the previous paragraph and probably think that GPS is quite dull.

The system works with 27 satellites in space known as the GNSS. Out of these, 24 of the satellites are active and three are a backup. Each satellite orbits the Earth every 12 hours constantly broadcasting the changing position data.

By performing calculations on data from at least three of these satellites, our device can provide us with a location in the world in longitude and latitude. Oversimplifying a little (ok, oversimplifying quite a lot), these are the degrees from the poles and equator. They are extremely precise values, as we will see, and therefore accurate potentially to five meters.

As...