Horton Android Programming for Beginners

Learn Android, Kotlin & Jetpack from scratch and Turbocharge progress with AI
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-80669-842-4
Verlag: Packt Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 676 Seiten

Modern Android development has evolved rapidly, with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose becoming the standard tools for building powerful mobile applications. Android Programming for Beginners provides a practical introduction for readers with little or no coding experience. Rather than overwhelming you with theory, the book teaches concepts gradually through hands-on experimentation and small, focused apps that reinforce core programming fundamentals.
You will begin by learning Kotlin essentials including variables, loops, functions, lambdas, collections, and object-oriented programming before moving into Android Studio and Jetpack Compose. As your skills grow, you will create interactive projects ranging from UI layouts and games to multimedia and database-driven applications. Along the way, you will explore Android development techniques such as state management, navigation, Material Design, Room databases, Canvas drawing, and responsive layouts.
To help future-proof your workflow, each chapter also includes optional AI-assisted programming exercises that show how modern coding tools can support experimentation, accelerate development, and deepen understanding. By the end of the book, you will have built a portfolio of Android apps and gained the confidence to continue toward advanced mobile development projects independently.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Horton, John

Leseproben

Preface

Welcome to . What follows is a whirlwind tour and introduction to Android development, the most modern tools available to us, and what we will learn in this book.

Who this book is for

Whether you have never programmed before, never used Kotlin, or never built an Android app, I have designed this book for you. If you have programming experience—perhaps in Java—or have built Android apps but are new to Kotlin or Jetpack Compose, you'll find plenty of tailored guidance here as well.

Android

What's so great about Android? Some would say one of the best things is Google's support, but let's just be more specific: Google's money is what makes Android what it is. All the features and tools we will talk about are entirely because of or made significantly better because of Google's investment.

Of course, the best thing about Android could also be argued as the worst thing. Despite this, Android is still way more open than its competitors. There are multiple non-Google app stores, and you can distribute a package containing a fully working Android app from your own website or Bittorrent, or you can opt for the highly controlled but potentially extremely lucrative official app outlet, the Play Store.

So whether you want to be an open source digital nomad spreading the latest censorship resistant cryptography solutions, you want to make a fast buck off of the 2.5 billion users who frequent the Play Store or you want to embark on a career working for one of the many big corporations through to small startup companies, Android in my view is and always has been the best choice.

Another plus for Android is that there are so many more devices to choose from. Cheap and practical, shiny technological marvels that fold, to gloriously slim and tactile tablets. These devices are deeply personal to their users. As a developer, you have the power to interact with your users in ways that mere movie, book, game, and music creators cannot. In fact, your apps can include any or all of these media.

The level of customization available on Android devices further strengthens this personal attachment that many users have to their devices. Android has always been and still is far ahead of its competitors in this respect. Now, not only can the user change their color schemes, wallpapers, themes, fonts, and widgets, but we can also easily make our apps adapt to their choices and fit right in with their customizations. Android Material Design allows us to create unique, never-before-seen app designs that still work and look as the user expects. All this and more we will explore as we proceed through the book.

As if we have not covered enough reasons to choose Android development, here is another: Android Studio.

Android Studio

Android Studio is a derivative of IntelliJ IDEA, a multi-platform (not just for Android) and multi-language (not just Kotlin and Java) IDE from JetBrains. But that doesn't mean it's inferior. It is specifically kitted out for Android development. It enables us to quickly create a basic but fully working Android app in just a few clicks, and it includes a built-in system for quickly booting an emulator that replicates the appearance and quirks of almost any Android device. No real devices required—although you can still run your creations on a real device.

Android Studio also has advanced features, some of which we will see in later chapters, such as debugging, performance analysis, and integration with Google services. Don't attempt to complete this book with anything else; it's totally free, too.

Kotlin & Jetpack (and Java)

Kotlin was developed by JetBrains, the same company that makes Android Studio. Kotlin is Google's recommended language for Android. It has officially superseded Java. Kotlin offers superior features for key Android programming requirements. In addition, to be blunt, Kotlin is less likely to crash than Java. If you have used Java at any time, you will have experienced a null pointer exception. Kotlin takes significant steps to make it much easier to avoid these crashes.

Kotlin also has a load of modern features that we will discover as we proceed, such as type inference, where you don't even need to type all the code; Kotlin just knows what you're going to do and lets you type less.

Kotlin has loads of data structures and built-in sorting options, which means you might never need to write the dullest parts of a program again and can focus on the exciting bits that are important to your users.

Another Kotlin advantage I will mention, although there are more, is that Kotlin is a modern, multi-paradigm language; it is both functional and object-oriented, making it easier to write code structured around functions. Some of the best new Android programming libraries are only available through Kotlin.

Not only is Kotlin better in all these ways and more, but it is also fully compatible and interoperable with Java. This means you can compile your Kotlin to Java bytecode and then turn that back into Java. If you feel you must, you can also use both Java and Kotlin in the same app, again, if you want to. I guess that by the end of this book, you will stick with just Kotlin, but that will be up to you.

For these reasons, and not because Google wants me to, this book will focus entirely on Kotlin, with the occasional nostalgic glance back in the rear-view mirror at those sepia-colored Java days. If you love Java and my words have made you sad, as they once did to me, take heart: not only does your Kotlin code run on a JVM, but it also requires the Java Development Kit in the background to compile its bytecode. Heck, we will even put all our Kotlin code in a folder named . Rest easy, Java fans, Kotlin would be nothing without those who came before it.

In Android itself, the Jetpack Compose library and framework massively streamlines UI design and implementation. It is declarative, which means you can express your inner Van Gogh in code, and Compose applies the digital paint to produce stunning user interfaces.

Not only does Jetpack Compose look great with little effort, but it also handles connecting our UIs to our data, whether that data is on the user's phone or the Internet. It wires the UI up to the user's interactions more simply than ever before. Jetpack Compose is faster to write small apps and more organized and safer for complex projects.

Jetpack is written in Kotlin, for Kotlin, and would not be possible without Kotlin. Sure, it can get a bit complicated at times, but this book includes lots of explanations and full code listings in the text and on GitHub. Kotlin and Jetpack are so much faster for creating a great, user-friendly app than ever before.

This is going to be easier than with Java, right?

Kotlin is easy to learn, especially in my view, if you have never programmed before. If you are brand new to programming, I won't skip over anything you need to understand to make sure you pick things up quickly and in full.

One of the slightly jarring aspects of Kotlin is the small differences from other languages alongside its vast expressiveness (extra syntax options). But if you have prior programming experience, I will point out small gotchas, explain a few seemingly inexplicable nuances, and have you back to building apps in no time. For example, there are no semicolons at the end of a line of Kotlin code. Crazy right?

Another sometimes tricky aspect of Kotlin, but one that will eventually become a huge positive, is its expressiveness. There are so many built-in keywords, functions, and features. But actually, this becomes an advantage. We will see in multiple chapters how learning a Kotlin feature completely replaces what in other languages would have been an entire chapter of a new programming technique. This is especially true when learning about manipulating collections of data. Often, a whole block of code is replaced with a single line of expressive Kotlin.

So Kotlin is easy to learn, although there is much to learn. It is also true that to fully understand the basic starting code for an Android app that uses Jetpack Compose, you first need to grasp a whole range of Kotlin topics and principles. This can be a bit awkward.

However, this book was written from scratch to solve that awkwardness. There are already a dozen Kotlin books that just teach Kotlin, and many dozens of Android books that assume you already know Kotlin (or Java). Still, this book will get you building progressively more advanced Android apps, starting in just a few pages, as you learn Kotlin and build on your existing knowledge as we proceed. There will be many "aha" moments throughout the book, perhaps when a piece of syntax finally makes full sense or the reason for an approach becomes clear—but the point of the book is that we won't wait for all those moments before we start building loads of functional, deployable Android apps.

Think of it as an on-the-job apprenticeship instead of a huge, long lecture. This approach will...