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  • Book Overview & Buying Android Programming for Beginners
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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

Polymorphism

We already know from the start of Chapter 18 that polymorphism means different forms. But what does it mean to us?

Boiled down to its simplest, it means the following:

  • Any subclass can be used as part of the code that uses the superclass
  • This means that we can write code that is easier to understand and simpler to change

Also, we can write code for the super-class and rely on the fact that no matter how many times it is sub-classed, within certain parameters, the code will still work. Let's discuss an example.

Supposing that we want to use polymorphism to help write a zoo management app. We will probably want to have a function, such as feed. Let's also say we have Lion, Tiger, and Camel classes that all inherit from a parent class called Animal. We will probably also want to pass a reference to the animal to be fed to the feed function. This might seem like we need to write a feed function for each Animal subclass.

As a reminder from the end of Chapter 18, when...

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Android Programming for Beginners
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