Chapter 1, Beginning Your Kotlin Adventure, discusses the Kotlin language, its features, and reasons to use it. We'll introduce the reader to the Kotlin platform and show how Kotlin fits into the  Android development process.

Chapter 2, Laying a Foundation, is largely devoted to the building blocks of Kotlin. It presents various constructs, data types, and features that make Kotlin an enjoyable language to work with.

Chapter 3, Playing with Functions, explains various ways to define and call a function. We will also discuss function modifiers and look at possible locations where function can be defined.

Chapter 4, Classes and Objects, discusses Kotlin features related to object-oriented programming. You will learn about different types of class. We will also see features that improve readability: property operator overloading and infix calls.

Chapter 5, Functions as First-Class Citizens, covers Kotlin support for functional programming and functions as first-class citizens. We will take a closer look at lambdas, higher order functions, and function types.

Chapter 6, Generics Are Your Friends, explores the subjects of generic classes, interfaces, and functions. We will take a closer look at the Kotlin generic type system.

Chapter 7, Extension Functions and Properties, demonstrates how to add new behavior to an existing class without using inheritance. We will also discuss simpler ways to deal with collections and stream processing.

Chapter 8, Delegates, shows how Kotlin simplifies class delegation due to built-in language support. We will see how to use it both by using built-in property delegates and by defining custom ones.

Chapter 9, Making Your Marvel Gallery Application, utilizes most of the features discussed in the book and uses them to build a fully functional Android application in Kotlin.

To test and use the code presented in this book, you need only Android Studio installed. Chapter 1, Beginning Your Kotlin Adventure, explains how a new project can be started and how the examples presented here can be checked. It also describes how most of the code presented here can be tested without any programs installed.

To use this book, you should be familiar with two areas:

Being open-minded and eager to learn new technologies will be very helpful. If something makes you curious or catches your attention, feel free to test it and play with it while you are reading this book

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Let's look at the range data type, which allows us to define end-inclusive ranges."

A block of code is set as follows:

    val capitol = "England" to "London"
    println(capitol.first) // Prints: England
    println(capitol.second) // Prints: London

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

    ext.kotlin_version = '1.1.3'
    repositories {
        maven { url 'https://maven.google.com' }
        jcenter()
    }

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

sdk install kotlin

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Set name, package, and location for the new project. Remember to tick the Include Kotlin support option."

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