Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose - Second Edition

By : Thomas Künneth
5 (1)
Book Image

Android UI Development with Jetpack Compose - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Thomas Künneth

Overview of this book

Compose has caused a paradigm shift in Android development, introducing a variety of new concepts that are essential to an Android developer’s learning journey. It solves a lot of pain points associated with Android development and is touted to become the default way to building Android apps over the next few years. This second edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect all changes and additions that were made by Google since the initial stable release, and all examples are based on Material 3 (also called Material You). This book uses practical examples to help you understand the fundamental concepts of Jetpack Compose and how to use them when you are building your own Android applications. You’ll begin by getting an in-depth explanation of the declarative approach, along with its differences from and advantages over traditional user interface (UI) frameworks. Having laid this foundation, the next set of chapters take a practical approach to show you how to write your first composable function. The chapters will also help you master layouts, an important core component of every UI framework, and then move to more advanced topics such as animation, testing, and architectural best practices. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to write your own Android apps using Jetpack Compose and Material Design.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Fundamentals of Jetpack Compose
5
Part 2: Building User Interfaces
10
Part 3: Advanced Topics

Exploring the Key Principles of Compose

In the first chapter of this book, we built and ran our first Jetpack Compose app. Then, in Chapter 2, Understanding the Declarative Paradigm, we explained the imperative nature of Android’s traditional UI toolkit, illustrated some of its weaknesses, and saw how a declarative approach can overcome them.

In this chapter, we build upon these foundations by examining a few key principles Jetpack Compose relies on. This knowledge is essential for writing well-behaving Compose apps. This chapter introduces these key principles.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Looking closer at composable functions
  • Composing and recomposing the UI
  • Modifying the behavior of composable functions

We will start by revisiting composable functions, the building blocks of a composable UI. This time, we will dig much deeper into their underlying ideas and concepts. By the end of the first main section, you will have...