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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

Android MediaPlayer

In the next demo app, we will explore Android sounds for the first time. We will use the MediaPlayer class.

The MediaPlayer class is an Android class that can load an audio file and prepare it for playback. Once set up, an instance of MediaPlayer can play, pause, and stop audio with a simple function call.

We can think about a MediaPlayer instance as a remote control for sound.

Of course, we will need some sound in a standard format, such as .mp3 or .wav. We also need to place the sound file into the project in the res/raw folder.

Once we have done this, Android Studio creates a resource for us based on the sound file's name. Suppose we have a sound file called sound.wav. When we place it in the res/raw folder, we can then refer to the sound file in our code with the resource ID R.raw.sound. Behind the scenes, the resource ID is an Int, but we refer to it by the ID. Look at this code.

val context = LocalContext.current
val mediaPlayer = MediaPlayer.create(context...
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Android Programming for Beginners
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