Book Image

Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By : Neil Smyth
Book Image

Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials - Kotlin Edition

By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Popularity of Kotlin as an Android-compatible language keeps growing every day. This book will help you to build your own Android applications using Kotlin. Android Studio 3.5 Development Essentials Kotlin Edition first teaches you to install Android development and test environment on different operating systems. Next, you will create an Android app and a virtual device in Android studio, and install an Android application on emulators. You will test apps on physical android devices, then study Android Studio code editor, Android architecture, and the anatomy of an Android app. The focus then shifts to Kotlin language. You’ll get an overview of Kotlin language and practice converting code from Java to Kotlin. You’ll also explore Kotlin data types, operators, expressions, loops, functions, and the basics of OOP concept in Kotlin. This book will then cover Android Jetpack and how to create an example app project using ViewModel component, as well as advanced topics such as views and widgets implementation, multi-window support integration, and biometric authentication. Finally, you will learn to upload your app to the Google Play Console and handle the build process with Gradle. By the end of this book, you will have gained enough knowledge to develop powerful Android applications using Kotlin.
Table of Contents (93 chapters)
93
Index

11. An Introduction to Kotlin

Android development is performed primarily using Android Studio which is, in turn, based on the IntelliJ IDEA development environment created by a company named JetBrains. Prior to the release of Android Studio 3.0, all Android apps were written using Android Studio and the Java programming language (with some occasional C++ code when needed).

Since the introduction of Android Studio 3.0, however, developers now have the option of creating Android apps using another programming language called Kotlin. Although detailed coverage of all features of this language is beyond the scope of this book (entire books can and have been written covering solely Kotlin), the objective of this and the following six chapters is to provide enough information to begin programming in Kotlin and quickly get up to speed developing Android apps using this programming language.