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)

Exploring Android UI design

We will see with Android UI design that so much of what we learn is context-sensitive. The way that a given widget's x attribute will influence its appearance might depend on a widget's y attribute or even on an attribute on another widget. It isn't easy to learn this verbatim. It is best to expect to gradually get better and faster results with practice.

For example, if you play with the designer by dragging and dropping widgets onto the design, the Extensible Markup Language (XML) code that is generated will vary quite considerably, depending upon which layout type you are using. We will see this as we go ahead throughout this chapter.

This is because different layout types use different means to decide the position of their children—for example, the LinearLayout we will explore next works very differently from the ConstraintLayout that was added by default to our project in Chapter 1, Beginning Android and Java.

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