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

A quick guided tour of Android Studio


To get started, take a look at this annotated diagram of Android Studio. We will reacquaint ourselves with the parts that we have already seen, and learn about the parts that we have not yet discussed:

It will be useful to formally point out and name the various parts of the Android Studio User Interface (UI), so that I can refer to them by name, rather than describing their location and showing screenshots all the time. So, let's run through them from number 1:

  1. This is the Project window and will be the main focus of this chapter. It enables us to explore the folders, code, and resources of the project and is also referred to as the Project Explorer window. Double-click on a file here to open the file and add a new tab to area 3 on the diagram. The structure of the files and folders here closely resembles the structure that will eventually end up in the finished APK file.

    Note

    As we will see, while the structure of folders for an Android project remains...