Your First Kotlin Android App: An App From Scratch
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Notes: 01. Introduction
No prerequisite programming knowledge is needed to follow along this course. You just need a decent computer and a strong commitment to learning.
Hello everyone and welcome to the first course on learning Android development with kotlin. If you’ve be looking for where to start learning Android development then this course is definately for you. This course assumes that you have no programming or Android development experience because we would be starting from scratch and work our way up into building a complete Android app.
For this course, you’ll learn how to build a simple but fun game called Bullseye, where the player is tasked with guessing the target value using a slider. This course is meant for folks at all levels of programming. It’s good for experienced developers if you’re just new to Kotlin and Android. And it’s also good for people who’ve never programmed at all.
You’ll create Bullseye using the Kotlin programming language and Jetpack Compose. Jetpack Compose is a fun new way of creating interfaces for Android apps and learning it now will give you a head start over other developers.
We’ll begin by:
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Learning what Kotlin and Android are. You’ll get to know why most modern apps use the Kotlin programming language and what Android really means from a developer’s perspective.
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Then you’ll download and setup Android Studio and install all the components necessary to start developing Android apps.
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You’ll also learn about Jetpack Compose and how it differs from building user interfaces using XML. After that, you’ll create the basic user interface for the Bullseye app.
In the second part of the course:
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You’ll learn how to make the app interactive by making a button run an action when tapped. In this case, you’ll just print a message to the console.
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You’ll learn a very important concept in building apps: State. With this, you’ll display a popup alert when the button is clicked.
Finally, in the third part:
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You’ll dive into more fundamental concepts of the Kotlin programming language. You’ll learn about key Kotlin concepts like if/else statements, other function signatures, type inference and the Kotlin standard library. The Kotlin standard library provides lots of tools for us so we dont have to reinvent the wheel for common functionalities.
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And along the way you’ll learn how to refactor your code to reduce the amount of lines of code it takes to implement a functionality.
This course is designed to be hands-on where we’ll be building the app together step by step. It’s very important that you don’t just watch the exercises, but actually follow along. Open up Android Studio, type along with me and run the app we’ll be building in an emulator. This helps you understand how the app gets built step by step.
In addition, the course contains several hands-on challenges, where you’ll get to practice what you’ve just learned on your own.
It’s in your best interest to actually pause the video and try solving the challenges - you’ll learn a lot by doing this. Because, there is a big difference between knowing the path and actually walking the path… And the only way to learn programming is to actually do it.
It is my sincere belief that this course, and those that follow in our Android Beginners learning path, can turn you from a complete newbie into an accomplished Android developer. But you do have to put in the time and effort.
By making this course, we’ve done our part. The rest is up to you!!!
I’m super excited to start this off and I believe you are too. So let’s blast off into our Android adventure by taking a look at what exactly Kotlin and Android are. I’ll see you in the next episode.