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

Fragments


Fragments will likely become a staple of almost every app you make. They are so useful, there are so many reasons to use them, and—once you get used to them—they are so simple, that there is almost no reason not to use them.

Fragments are reusable elements of an app, just like any class, but, as we mentioned previously, they have special features—such as the ability to load their own view/layout, as well as their very own lifecycle functions—which make them perfect for achieving the goals we discussed in the Real-world apps section.

Let's dig a bit deeper into fragments, one feature at a time.

Fragments have a life cycle too

We can set up and control fragments, very much like we do with activities, by overriding the appropriate lifecycle functions.

The onCreate function

In the onCreate function, we can initialize variables and do almost all the things we typically do in the Activity onCreate function. The big exception to this is initializing our UI.

The onCreateView function

In the...