How to Read This Book
Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack — by Michael Fazio (7 / 125)
👈 If You’re New to Android and/or Kotlin | TOC | Development Tips for the Book 👉
As I mentioned above, the book is split into two apps: Penny Drop and Android Baseball League. Penny Drop is intended as a introduction to Android, Jetpack, and Kotlin. If you’re new to any of those, it’ll definitely be worth your time to build the Penny Drop app (plus, it’s fun). But even for those of you who know Android well, I bet you’ll learn a few things as well in going through the first app.
The ABL app is where things get more advanced. Many of the chapters are effectively part two of ones from Penny Drop. For example, Chapter 5, Persist Game Data with Room, is the introduction to using Room, Android’s ORM (object-relational mapping) library, which makes for easier database interaction. Then, Chapter 10, Load and Save Data with Coroutines and Room, takes those database concepts and adds in API calls and more coroutines. As a result, while building Penny Drop first isn’t a requirement, it does make things clearer. I go through things faster with the ABL app, and there’s more pre-existing code for you to integrate instead of building everything yourself.
Speaking of which, all the source code for the book can be found at https://media.pragprog.com/titles/mfjetpack/code/mfjetpack-code.zip. I included the end result from each chapter of the book so you always have both a reference and a starting point for the next chapter as needed. Also, with the ABL app, there’s code to copy from that ZIP file into your project. The intent here is to get a more full-featured app without you having to write every bit of code but instead letting you focus on the main concepts of the chapter.
The last two main chapters of the book are focused on testing, in particular unit and Android UI testing. Those both use the Penny Drop app as the basis. If you didn’t want to build Penny Drop but instead just want to try out the testing pieces, you can always grab code from the ZIP to use as your baseline when getting everything set.
You’ll also find three appendixes at the end of the book: one with instructions for installing Android Studio, one with troubleshooting tips for development, and one with all the dependencies used in the book. The key feature of the last appendix is that all the dependency version numbers can be found there. I went that route instead of mentioning them in each chapter to avoid inconsistencies, plus then we have a single spot to check for any dependency.
Finally, a heads-up that while the book was written (mostly) on Windows and the screenshots are all of the Windows version of Android Studio, things will work the same if you’re using a Mac. This means you’re free to develop on the OS you’re most comfortable using.
👈 If You’re New to Android and/or Kotlin | TOC | Development Tips for the Book 👉
Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack by Michael Fazio can be purchased in other book formats directly from the Pragmatic Programmers. If you notice a code error or formatting mistake, please let us know here so that we can fix it.
