Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners - Third Edition

By : John Horton
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners - Third Edition

By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Do you want to make a career in programming but don’t know where to start? Do you have a great idea for an app but don't know how to make it a reality? Or are you worried that you’ll have to learn Java programming to become an Android developer? Look no further! This new and expanded third edition of Android Programming for Beginners will be your guide to creating Android applications from scratch. The book starts by introducing you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the basics of Java to working with the Android API. You’ll learn with the help of examples that use up-to-date API classes and are created within Android Studio, the official Android development environment that helps supercharge your mobile application development process. After a crash course on the key programming concepts, you’ll explore Android programming and get to grips with creating applications with a professional-standard UI using fragments and storing user data with SQLite. This Android Java book also shows you how you can make your apps multilingual, draw on the screen with a finger, and work with graphics, sound, and animations. By the end of this Android programming book, you'll be ready to start building your own custom applications in Android and Java.
Table of Contents (30 chapters)

Creating UI widgets from pure Java without XML

We can also create widgets from Java objects that are not a reference to an object in our layout. We can declare, instantiate, and set a widget's attributes all in code, as follows:

Button myButton = new Button();

The preceding code creates a new Button by using the new() keyword. The only caveat is that the Button has to be part of a layout before it can be seen by the user. So, we could either get a reference to a layout element from our XML layout or create a new one, in code.

If we assume that we have a LinearLayout in our XML with an id property equal to linearLayout1, we could put our Button from the earlier line of code into it, as follows:

// Get a reference to the LinearLayout
LinearLayout linearLayout = (LinearLayout)
   findViewById(R.id.linearLayout);
// Add our Button to it
linearLayout.addView(myButton);

We could even create an entire layout in pure Java code by, first, creating a new layout...