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

12. Kotlin Data Types,Variables and Nullability

Both this and the following few chapters are intended to introduce the basics of the Kotlin programming language. This chapter will focus on the various data types available for use within Kotlin code. This will also include an explanation of constants, variables, type casting and Kotlin’s handling of null values.

As outlined in the previous chapter, entitled “An Introduction to Kotlin” a useful way to experiment with the language is to use the Kotlin online playground environment. Before starting this chapter, therefore, open a browser window, navigate to https://play.kotlinlang.org and use the playground to try out the code in both this and the other Kotlin introductory chapters that follow.