Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

By : John Horton
5 (1)
Book Image

Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners

5 (1)
By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world and Kotlin has been declared by Google as a first-class programming language to build Android apps. With the imminent arrival of the most anticipated Android update, Android 10 (Q), this book gets you started building apps compatible with the latest version of Android. It adopts a project-style approach, where we focus on teaching the fundamentals of Android app development and the essentials of Kotlin by building three real-world apps and more than a dozen mini-apps. The book begins by giving you a strong grasp of how Kotlin and Android work together before gradually moving onto exploring the various Android APIs for building stunning apps for Android with ease. You will learn to make your apps more presentable using different layouts. You will dive deep into Kotlin programming concepts such as variables, functions, data structures, Object-Oriented code, and how to connect your Kotlin code to the UI. You will learn to add multilingual text so that your app is accessible to millions of more potential users. You will learn how animation, graphics, and sound effects work and are implemented in your Android app. By the end of the book, you will have sound knowledge about significant Kotlin programming concepts and start building your own fully featured Android apps.
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
Android Programming with Kotlin for Beginners
Contributors
Preface
Index

Visibility modifiers


Visibility modifiers are used to control the access/visibility of variables, functions, and even whole classes. As we will see, it is possible to have variables, functions, and classes with different levels of access depending upon where in the code the access is being attempted from. This allows the designers of a class to practice good encapsulation and make just the functionality and data they choose available to users of the class. As a slightly contrived but useful example, the designers of a class used to talk to a satellite and get GPS data wouldn't allow access to the dropOutOfTheSky function.

These are the four access modifiers in Kotlin.

Public

Declaring classes, functions, and properties as public means that they are not hidden/encapsulated at all. In fact, the default visibility is public and everything we have seen and used so far is, therefore, public. We could make this explicit by using the public keyword before all our class, function, and property declarations...