Introduction
Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack — by Michael Fazio (4 / 125)
👈 Preface | TOC | Who Is This Book For 👉
Welcome to modern Android development! I know I’ve already thrown the phrase “modern” out a few times, but it’s accurate. Kotlin makes the entire Android dev experience so much nicer than it was in the past, and then you add in the Jetpack frameworks and concepts? The whole situation gets better and better.
When we first discussed creating this book, I knew I wanted a way to share my love of Kotlin with others but wasn’t sure what I wanted for a topic. Android was always the most logical spot because I’ve worked with Android for years, but I felt like there were already so many Android books out there. How would my book be any different?
Attempting to make the book unique led me to two conclusions: I wanted to focus on the newest approaches/libraries possible, and I wanted to make the apps interesting. The former was handled by squaring in on Jetpack. This is Google’s recommended approach for Android dev, and they’ve done such a good job of introducing better ways to handle standard actions within an Android app. It may not seem as revelatory if you’re new to Android development, but as someone who’s done this for years, trust me that the Jetpack libraries make your life so much easier.
The second piece here is the apps. While there’s nothing wrong with starting with a “To-Do List” app, I wanted something more fun. Building your first Android app and it’s a game? That’s way better! I love how Penny Drop is a nice, simple table game, so we can instead focus on everything else we need to do to build the app. Plus, once we get the core game running, we have a bunch of ways to add on additional features while highlighting useful parts of Android development.
Then there’s the Android Baseball League. This is in a lot of ways my personal baseball fandom coming out, but it also gives us a sample app that looks like something you’d see in the Play Store. Plus, we end up with a number of ways to pull data into the app from APIs, which is basically a requirement for Android apps nowadays.
Actually, the APIs are probably the best example of my love of baseball. All the data for the Android Baseball League was created and/or generated by me. This includes the teams, players, box scores, all of it. As a developer, two of the things I’ve wanted to do most in my life were to write a book and create a baseball simulator, and I was able to do both at once. I so enjoy how great Penny Drop works as an app, but the ABL app is the most near and dear to my heart. I first and foremost included ABL because it’s an excellent advanced app, but man, was it ever fun to put together.
I love Kotlin, I love Android, and I love having this chance to share both with you. I hope you feel the same way once you’ve gone though the book and that you can sense my excitement the entire way.
👈 Preface | TOC | Who Is This Book For 👉
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.
