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Android Programming for Beginners

Android Programming for Beginners - Fourth Edition

By : John Horton
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Android Programming for Beginners

Android Programming for Beginners

By: John Horton

Overview of this book

Modern Android development has evolved rapidly, with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose becoming the standard tools for building powerful mobile applications. Android Programming for Beginners provides a practical introduction for readers with little or no coding experience. Rather than overwhelming you with theory, the book teaches concepts gradually through hands-on experimentation and small, focused apps that reinforce core programming fundamentals. You will begin by learning Kotlin essentials including variables, loops, functions, lambdas, collections, and object-oriented programming before moving into Android Studio and Jetpack Compose. As your skills grow, you will create interactive projects ranging from UI layouts and games to multimedia and database-driven applications. Along the way, you will explore Android development techniques such as state management, navigation, Material Design, Room databases, Canvas drawing, and responsive layouts. To help future-proof your workflow, each chapter also includes optional AI-assisted programming exercises that show how modern coding tools can support experimentation, accelerate development, and deepen understanding. By the end of the book, you will have built a portfolio of Android apps and gained the confidence to continue toward advanced mobile development projects independently.
Table of Contents (36 chapters)
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1
Part 1: Kotlin & Jetpack Compose Basics
11
Part 2: Data Structures, Kotlin Fundamentals & More Advanced UIs
20
Part 3: Object-Oriented Programming & Building More Advanced Apps
29
Part 4: Vibe Coding & Learning with AI
34
Other Books You May Enjoy
35
Index

Basic maps

We can't do anything with a map until we create one, so first, we will see how to declare a map. Look at this code.

val agesImmutable = mapOf(
    "Dave" to 30,
    "Rodney" to 25
)

val agesMutable = mutableMapOf(
    "Marlene" to 40,
    "Trigger" to 35
)

In the preceding code, we create an immutable map, agesImmutable, with two key-value pairs. The key of Dave maps to the value 30, and the key Rodney maps to the value 25. After that, we created a mutable map called agesMutable with a key of Marlene mapping to 40 and a key of Trigger mapping to 35.

Now we have two maps, an immutable map created with the mapOf function, and a mutable map created with the mutableMapOf function. Let's see what we can (and can't) do with them. Look at the following code:

agesImmutable["Grandad"] = 76 // Error immutable
// It's Dave's birthday
agesImmutable["Dave"] = 31 // Error immutable

agesMutable["Del...
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Programming languages
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Android Programming for Beginners
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