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

Summary

This chapter explored the predefined layouts of Row(), Column(), and Box(). You learned how to combine them to create beautiful UIs. You were also introduced to ConstraintLayout, which places composables that are relative to others on the screen and flattens the UI element hierarchy.

The second main section explained why the layout system in Jetpack Compose is more performant than the traditional View-based approach. We looked at some of the internals of the Compose runtime, which prepared us for the final main section of this chapter, Creating custom layouts, where you learned how to create a custom layout and thus gain precise control over the rendering of its children.

The next chapter, Chapter 5, Managing State of Your Composable Functions, will deepen your knowledge of state. We will look at advanced use cases and learn more about Jetpack Compose’s reactive state primitives.