Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

By : Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal
Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

By: Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal

Overview of this book

Looking to kick-start your app development journey with Android 13, but don’t know where to start? How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin is a comprehensive guide that will help jump-start your Android development practice. This book starts with the fundamentals of app development, enabling you to utilize Android Studio and Kotlin to get started with building Android projects. You'll learn how to create apps and run them on virtual devices through guided exercises. Progressing through the chapters, you'll delve into Android's RecyclerView to make the most of lists, images, and maps, and see how to fetch data from a web service. You'll also get to grips with testing, learning how to keep your architecture clean, understanding how to persist data, and gaining basic knowledge of the dependency injection pattern. Finally, you'll see how to publish your apps on the Google Play store. You'll work on realistic projects that are split up into bitesize exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. You'll build apps to create quizzes, read news articles, check weather reports, store recipes, retrieve movie information, and remind you where you parked your car. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to build your own creative Android applications using Kotlin.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Part 1: Android Foundation
6
Part 2: Displaying Network Calls
12
Part 3: Testing and Code Structure
17
Part 4: Polishing and Publishing an App

Summary

This chapter has covered fragments in depth, starting with learning about the fragment lifecycle and the key functions to override in your own fragments. We then moved on to adding simple fragments statically to an app in XML and demonstrating how the UI display and logic can be self-contained in individual fragments. Other options for how to add fragments to an app using a FragmentContainerView and dynamically adding and replacing fragments were then covered. We then finished with how this can be simplified by using the Jetpack Navigation component.

Fragments are one of the fundamental building blocks of Android development. The concepts you have learned about here will allow you to build upon them and progress to create increasingly more advanced apps. Fragments are at the core of building effective navigation into your apps in order to bind features and functionality that are simple and easy to use.

The next chapter will explore this area in detail by using established...