Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition

By : John Horton
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition

By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Are you trying to start a career in programming, but haven't found the right way in? Do you have a great idea for an app, but don't know how to make it a reality? Or maybe you're just frustrated that in order to learn Android, you must know Java. If so, then this book is for you. This new and expanded second edition of Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android Pie applications from scratch. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the basics of Java to working with the Android API. All examples use the up-to-date API classes, and 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 and store your user's data with SQLite. In addition, you'll see how to make your apps multilingual, draw to the screen with a finger, 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 (35 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Exploring the project's Java code and the main layout's XML code


We are going to look at the resource files that have the code that defines our simple UI layout and the file that has our Java code. At this stage, we will not try to understand it all as we need to learn some more basics before it makes sense to do so. What we will see, however, is the basic content and structure of both files so we can reconcile their content with what we already know about Android resources and Java.

Examining the HelloWorldActivity.java file

Let's look at the Java code first. You can see this code by left-clicking on the HelloWorldActivity.java tab, as shown in the following screenshot:

As we are not looking at the intricate details of the code, an annotated screenshot is more useful than reproducing the actual code in text form. Regularly refer to the following screenshot while reading on with this section:

The first thing to note is that I have added a few empty lines amongst the code to space things out...