Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

By : Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal
5 (1)
Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

5 (1)
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

Navigation drawer

The navigation drawer is one of the most common navigation patterns used in Android apps and was certainly the first pattern to be widely adopted. The following is a screenshot of the culmination of the next exercise, which shows a simple navigation drawer in its closed state:

Figure 4.1 – App with the navigation drawer closed

Figure 4.1 – App with the navigation drawer closed

The navigation drawer is accessed through what has become commonly known as the hamburger menu, which is the icon with three horizontal lines at the top left of Figure 4.1. The navigation options are not visible on the screen, but contextual information about the screen you are on is displayed in the top app bar.

An overflow menu can also accompany this on the right-hand side of the screen, through which other contextually relevant navigation options can be accessed. The following screenshot is of a navigation drawer in the open state, showing all the navigation options:

Figure 4.2 – App with the navigation drawer open

Figure...