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

Chapter 7. Kotlin Variables, Operators, and Expressions

In this chapter and the next, we are going to learn and practice the core fundamentals of Kotlin. In fact, we will explore the main principles of programming in general. In this chapter, we will focus on the creation and understanding of data itself, and in the next chapter, we will explore how to manipulate and respond to it.

This chapter will focus on the simplest type of data in Kotlin – variables. We will revisit more complex and powerful types of data in Chapter 15, Handling Data and Generating Random Numbers.

The core Kotlin fundamentals that we'll learn about apply when working within classes that we inherit from (such as Activity and AppCompatActivity) and the classes that we write ourselves (as we will start to do in Chapter 10, Object-Oriented Programming).

As it is more logical to learn the basics before we write our own classes, we will learn the basics and then use the extended Activity class, AppCompatActivity, to put...