Book Image

Mastering Android Development with Kotlin

By : Miloš Vasić
Book Image

Mastering Android Development with Kotlin

By: Miloš Vasić

Overview of this book

Kotlin is a programming language intended to be a better Java, and it's designed to be usable and readable across large teams with different levels of knowledge. As a language, it helps developers build amazing Android applications in an easy and effective way. This book begins by giving you a strong grasp of Kotlin's features in the context of Android development and its APIs. Moving on, you'll take steps towards building stunning applications for Android. The book will show you how to set up the environment, and the difficulty level will grow steadily with the applications covered in the upcoming chapters. Later on, the book will introduce you to the Android Studio IDE, which plays an integral role in Android development. We'll use Kotlin's basic programming concepts such as functions, lambdas, properties, object-oriented code, safety aspects, type parameterization, testing, and concurrency, which will guide you through writing Kotlin code in production. We'll also show you how to integrate Kotlin into any existing Android project.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 1. Starting with Android

Kotlin has been officially announced by Google as a first-class programming language for Android. Find out why Kotlin is the best tool available for you as a newcomer and why senior Android developers first adopted Kotlin.

In this chapter, you will learn how to set up a working environment. You will install and run Android Studio and set up Android SDK and Kotlin. Here, you will also be introduced to some important and useful tools such as Android Debug Bridge (adb).

Since you don't have your project yet, you will set it up. You will initialize a Git repository to track changes in your code and create an empty project. You will enable it to support Kotlin and add support for additional libraries that we will use.

After we have initialized the repository and project, we will go through the project structure and explain each file the IDE has generated. Finally, you will create your first screen and take a look at it.

This chapter will cover the following points:

  • Setting up an environment for the development of Git and Gradle basics
  • Working with Android Manifest
  • Android emulator
  • Android tools