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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

Constructors

We learned about and used some basic constructors in the previous chapter. We saw that you can declare properties, val or var, with or without default values in the parentheses of the class declaration, just like parameters in a function. However, there is more to constructors, and this section will take our understanding further.

Throughout this chapter and the last, we have been instantiating objects of our classes and have gone into some depth on the various syntax. There is one small part of the code we have been ignoring until now. The following code we have seen several times before; I have highlighted a small part so we can discuss it further.

val soldier = Soldier()

The brackets at the end of the code that initialize the object look just like the ones we used when calling a function (without any parameters). That is, in fact, precisely what is happening. When we declare a class, Kotlin provides (behind the scenes) a special function called a constructor that prepares...

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Android Programming for Beginners
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