Preface

Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack — by Michael Fazio (3 / 125)

👈 Acknowledgments | TOC | Introduction 👉

With Kotlin and Jetpack, Android development is now smoother and more enjoyable than ever before. In this book, we’re going to dive right into Android development by writing two complete Android apps.

With the first app, Penny Drop, you will create a full game complete with random die rolls, customizable rules, and AI opponents. You’ll build lightweight Fragment views with data binding, quickly and safely update data with ViewModel classes, and handle all app navigation in a single location. You’ll be guided to use Kotlin with Android-specific Kotlin extensions to efficiently write null-safe code without all the normal boilerplate required for pre-Jetpack + Kotlin apps. You’ll see how to persist and retrieve data as full objects with the Room library, then display that data with ViewModels and list records in a RecyclerView.

Next, you’ll create the official app for the Android Baseball League. It’s a fake league but a real app, where you use what you learn with Penny Drop and build up from there. You’ll navigate all over the app via a navigation drawer, including specific locations via Android App Links. You’ll handle asynchronous and web service calls with Kotlin coroutines, display that data smoothly with the Paging library, and send notifications to a user’s phone from your app.