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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

Using code comments

Code comments are like time-capsule messages that we leave for ourselves in our code to remind ourselves why we wrote it. If you work on a team, the messages are also for your colleagues. Why we need to do this isn't always obvious to new programmers, so let's explore.

Android code can grow in scale very quickly. Unless you have a rare mental gift, even the best programmers will not remember why they wrote a certain piece of code when they revisit it after some time.

There is an old programming saying that programmers spend more time reading and understanding old code than they do writing new code.

There is an old programming joke that goes something like this. "What idiot wrote this code?" Some time passes... "Oh, it was me".

Code comments help solve these problems by providing clear explanations for why certain lines of code exist. For example, here is a Kotlin single-line comment.

// This code is never executed – it is just...
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Tech Concepts
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Programming languages
73
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Android Programming for Beginners
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