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)

Persisting data with SharedPreferences

In Android, there are a few ways to make data persist. By persist, I mean that if the user quits the app, then when they come back to it, their data is still available. Which method is the correct one to use is dependent upon the app and the type of data.

In this book, we will look at three ways to make data persist. For saving our users' settings, we only need a simple method. After all, we just need to know whether they want the decorative divider between each of the notes in the RecyclerView widget.

Let's look at how we can make our apps save and reload variables to the internal storage of the device. We need to use the SharedPreferences class. SharedPreferences is a class that provides access to data that can be accessed and edited by all Activity classes of an app. Let's look at how we can use it:

// A SharedPreferences for reading data
SharedPreferences prefs;
// A SharedPreferences.Editor for writing data
SharedPreferences...