Book Image

Android Studio 4.1 Development Essentials – Kotlin Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 4.1 Development Essentials – Kotlin Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Android 11 has a ton of new capabilities. It comes up with three foci: a people-centric approach to communication, controls to let users quickly access and manage all of their smart devices, and privacy to give users more ways to control how data on devices is shared. This book starts off with the steps necessary to set up an Android development and testing environment, followed by an introduction to programming in Kotlin. An overview of Android Studio and its architecture is provided, followed by an in-depth look at the design of Android applications and user interfaces using the Android Studio environment. You will also learn about the Android architecture components along with some advanced topics such as touch screen handling, gesture recognition, the recording and playback of audio, app links, dynamic delivery, the AndroidStudio profiler, Gradle build configuration, and submitting apps to the Google Play Developer Console. The concepts of material design are also covered in detail. This edition of the book also covers printing, transitions, and cloud-based file storage; foldable device support is the cherry on the cake. By the end of this course, you will be able to develop Android 11 Apps using Android Studio 4.1, Kotlin, and Android Jetpack. The code files for the book can be found here: https://www.ebookfrenzy.com/retail/as41kotlin/index.php
Table of Contents (95 chapters)
95
Index

11.1 What is Kotlin?

Named after an island located in the Baltic Sea, Kotlin is a programming language created by JetBrains and follows Java in the tradition of naming programming languages after islands. Kotlin code is intended to be easier to understand and write and also safer than many other programming languages. The language, compiler and related tools are all open source and available for free under the Apache 2 license.

The primary goals of the Kotlin language are to make code both concise and safe. Code is generally considered concise when it can be easily read and understood. Conciseness also plays a role when writing code, allowing code to be written more quickly and with greater efficiency. In terms of safety, Kotlin includes a number of features that improve the chances that potential problems will be identified when the code is being written instead of causing runtime crashes.

A third objective in the design and implementation of Kotlin involves interoperability...