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

Adding and Interacting with RecyclerView

In this chapter, you will learn how to add lists and grids of items to your apps and effectively leverage the recycling power of RecyclerView. You’ll also learn how to handle user interaction with the item views on the screen and support different item view types – for example, for titles. Later in the chapter, you’ll add and remove items dynamically.

By the end of the chapter, you will have the skills required to present your users with interactive lists of rich items.

In the previous chapter, we learned how to fetch data, including lists of items and image URLs, from APIs, and how to load images from URLs. Combining that knowledge with the ability to display lists of items is the goal of this chapter.

Quite often, you will want to present your users with a list of items. For example, you might want to show them a list of pictures on their device or let them select their country from a list of all countries. To...