Our Android Tutorial Team has been amazingly busy over the past year:
- Publicly, we’ve been busy creating more than 40 free Android tutorials for the site, and we’re now releasing a new Android tutorial every Wednesday.
- But secretly, we’ve been cooking up some surprises, including new Android books, and a pile of new Android video courses and screencasts.
Watch out — it’s an avalanche of new tutorials! It’s…an Android Avalanche!
As part of the Android Avalanche, we’re announcing our lineup of new Android books and video courses — and we’ve wrapped them up in a time-limited bundle that you can get at a massive discount.
And best of all – all of these new books, courses, and screencasts are 100% Kotlin! As the second most loved language in the recent StackOverflow Dev survey, the tide is coming! :]
Here’s a quick overview of what’s in store:
- New Android Books
- New Android Video Courses
- New Android Screencasts
- Android Avalanche Bundle
- Android Avalanche Giveaway
New Android Books
To lead off the Android Avalanche, we are releasing two brand-new books on getting started with Android and Kotlin development.
1) The Android Apprentice
The Android Apprentice is our book for complete beginners to Android development. It’s ideal for someone with prior programming experience (like Swift or Java), to get quickly up-to-speed with Android development.
And even better — the book is written in Kotlin, the modern, first-class language for Android developers.
This book teaches you how to build four complete Android apps from scratch:
- Timefighter: You’ll get started with Android development by creating a game with a simple goal: tap a button as fast as you can, within a set time limit.
- CheckList: Make a simple TODO app with multiple lists. Along the way, learn about layout managers, activities, saving data, and notifications.
- PlaceBook: Keep track of your favorite places with photos and maps. Along the way, learn about Google Play services, Room, Google Maps API, and working with photos.
- PodPlay: You’ll round out the book by building a podcast manager with a built-in media player. You’ll cover Android networking, job scheduling, media browser, notifications, and media playback.
The Android Apprentice is 100% complete and is available today — and it’s on sale as part of our Android Avalanche Bundle.
Android Apprentice Authors
Of course, the Android Apprentice would be nothing without the efforts from the hard-working authors on this book:
Darryl Bayliss is a Software Engineer from Liverpool, currently focusing on Mobile Development. Away from programming he is usually reading, writing on his blog or playing some fantastical video game involving magic and dragons.
Tom Blankenship has been addicted to coding since he was a young teenager, writing his first programs on Atari home computers. He currently runs his own software development company focused on native iOS and Android app development. He enjoys playing tennis, guitar, and drums, and spending time with his wife and two children.
2) The Kotlin Apprentice
Heard of Kotlin, but haven’t yet started to learn the language? Or maybe you want to explore some more advanced aspects of the language? Our second book — the Kotlin Apprentice — is here to help you out!
The Kotlin Apprentice is a book geared toward complete beginners to Kotlin. It’s ideal for people with little to no prior programming experience, but it’s also excellent for people who have prior programming experience and are looking to get up-to-speed quickly with the Kotlin language.
The book focuses on the core Kotlin language itself — not building Android apps. If you’re brand-new to Kotlin, we recommend reading this book first, and then working through the Android Apprentice after that.
Here’s a sneak peek of what’s inside:
- Coding Essentials and your IDE: We start you off right at the beginning so you can get up to speed with programming basics. Learn how to work with Intellij IDEA, which you will use throughout the rest of the book.
- Nullability: Kotlin helps you avoid the “billion dollar mistake” by only allowing data to be null if you explicitly allow it.
- Arrays, Lists, Maps, and Sets: Why have only one of a thing when you could have many? Learn about the Kotlin collection types — arrays, lists, maps, and sets — including what they’re good for, how to use them, and when to use each.
- Lambdas: Put code into variables and pass code around to help avoid callback insanity!
- Kotlin and Java Interoperability: Kotlin is designed to be 100% compatible with Java and the JVM. Seamlessly use Kotlin in your Java projects and call back and forth between the languages.
- Kotlin Coroutines: Simplify your asynchronous programming using Kotlin coroutines, and discover the differences between coroutines and threads.
- And much more!: We’ll take you through programming basics, object-oriented programming with classes, exceptions, generics, functional programming, and more!
The early access edition of the Kotlin Apprentice is available today and on sale as part of our Android Avalanche Bundle.
The full edition of the Kotlin Apprentice will be available a little later this year. You’ll get a free update to the full edition of the Kotlin Apprentice as part of your bundle purchase.
Kotlin Apprentice Authors
Here are the hard-working authors who have contributed to the Kotlin Apprentice:
Irina Galata is a software developer in Dnipro, Ukraine. She is passionate about Android, animations, public speeches, and Kotlin. You can find her on Medium and GitHub.
Joe Howard‘s path to software development began in the fields of computational physics and systems engineering. He has been a mobile software developer on iOS and Android since 2009. He now lives in Boston and is Android Team Lead for raywenderlich.com.
Richard Lucas is a developer by trade but he adds value anyway he can, code or otherwise. He’s interested in Android, blockchain, encrypted messaging, robo advisors, climate change, disaster recovery, and internet infrastructure.
Ellen Shapiro is an iOS developer for Bakken & Bæck‘s Amsterdam office who also occasionally writes Android apps. She is working in her spare time to help bring songwriting app Hum to life. She’s also developed several independent applications through her personal company, Designated Nerd Software. When she’s not writing code, she’s usually tweeting about it.
New Android Video Courses
Next in the Android Avalanche is a massive batch of new video courses for raywenderlich.com subscribers!
These courses are designed to be followed in order, with the goal of taking you from a complete Android beginner, all the way to a professional Android developer.
These courses are designed as a companion to the Android Apprentice and Kotlin Apprentice books. We recommend you work through the video courses first, and refer back to the books for review or additional information.
1) Your First Kotlin App
In this course by Brian Moakley, you’ll get started with Android & Kotlin development by creating your first app: a simple game called “Timefighter”. Through a series of hands-on exercises and challenges, you’ll learn:
- How to build your first Android + Kotlin App
- How to use Android Studio
- How to run an Android app on emulator and device
- How to design apps that look great
This course is available today and is 100% free for everyone!
2) Programming in Kotlin
In this course by Kevin Moore, you’ll take a deep dive into the Kotlin programming language itself.
Through a series of hands-on exercises and challenges, you’ll learn how to use Kotlin types, flow control, functions, classes, properties, lambdas, collections, nullables, methods, and much more.
This course is will be released tomorrow, March 20.
3) Your Second Kotlin Android App
In this course by Brian Moakley, you’ll continue your Android development journey by creating another app. Not just any app, but a TODO list app. You’ll build this app from the ground up and in the process you’ll do the following:
- Learn about a recycler view, what they do, and how to incorporate it into your app
- Save your todo lists by way of shared preferences and how to read them back again
- Create multiple activities and learn how to pass data between them
- Refactor your app into fragments and get it to work on a multiple screen sizes
- Learn about Android Material Design and how to use it to improve your app
This course will be released this Wednesday, March 21.
4) Beginning Android Layouts
In this course by Joe Howard, you’ll learn how to use Android’s layout system to lay out the views in your app, regardless of devices size. Through a series of hands-on exercises and challenges, you’ll learn the following:
- How view layout and the view hierarchy works in Android
- How to use the basic layout types: RelativeLayout and LinearLayout
- How to use the complex but powerful ConstraintLayout
- How to use both the design editor and XML editor in Android Studio
This course will be released this Thursday, March 22.
5) Beginning RecyclerView
In this course by Joe Howard, you’ll learn how to use Android’s RecyclerView to efficiently display a list of items. Through a series of hands-on exercises and challenges, you’ll learn the following:
- How to use bind model data to RecyclerViews
- How to use the various RecyclerView layout managers: LinearLayoutManager, GridLayoutManager, and StaggeredGridLayoutManager
- How to use item decorations for spacing and separators
- How to use animation to affect the display of RecyclerView items
This course will be released this Friday, March 23.
6) Android Animations
In this course by Joe Howard, you’ll learn how add dynamic animations to your Android apps. Through a series of hands-on exercises and challenges, you’ll learn the following:
- How to use the basic property and view animators on Android
- How to use interpolators, animator sets, and animation listeners
- How to work with scenes and transitions
- How to work with animated vector drawables
This course will be released next Monday, March 26.
7) Saving Data on Android
In this course by Joe Howard, you’ll learn how persist data on your Android apps between app restarts. Through a series of hands-on exercises and challenges, you’ll learn the following:
- How to use use SharedPreferences
- How to read/write files to storage
- How to save data using SQLite
- How to use the new Room library (part of the Android Architecture Components) to save data
This course will be released next Tuesday, March 27.
8) Android Networking
In this course by Joe Howard, you’ll learn how to make calls to REST APIs to send and receive structured data. Through a series of hands-on exercises and challenges, you’ll learn the following:
- How fundamental concepts of networking like HTTP, requests, and responses work
- How to setup and make basic use of the Retrofit networking library
- How to handle other networking tasks like authentication, posts, and updates
- How to perform basic network monitoring using an interceptor or the Android Profiler
This course will be released next Wednesday, March 28.
How To Get the Courses
Like what you see?
This entire 8-course series, covering over 600 minutes of Android learning is already included in your raywenderlich.com subscription. And if you don’t have one already, you can pick one up as part of our Android Avalanche Bundle!
New Advanced Android Screencasts
Already an experienced Android developer? We’ve got something for you as well.
raywenderlich.com will be releasing regular screencasts on advanced Android topics.
Our screencasts are designed for experienced developers who want to quickly pick up new skills. You can check out a single screencast while enjoying your morning coffee and pick up something new that you may not have known before.
To start things off with a bang, we’ll release our first two screencasts next Thursday, March 29:
- Getting Started with TensorFlow on Android: TensorFlow is the powerful open-source machine learning and deep learning library from Google. Learn how to use it in your Android apps.
- Getting Started with Flutter: Learn how to use the Flutter beta UI framework from Google to develop cross-platforms apps for iOS and Android, using Android Studio and VS Code.
These new screencasts are included in your raywenderlich.com subscription. And remember, this is only the beginning!
Android Avalanche Bundle
To celebrate the launch of our new Android books, courses, and screencasts, we are offering a special bundle where you can get everything we’ve covered in this post — at a big discount!
Our new Android Avalanche Bundle includes:
- Android Apprentice ($54.99 value): Gives you access to our new Android Apprentice book, which teaches you how to build four complete Android apps from scratch. PDF/ePub format.
- Kotlin Apprentice ($54.99 value): Gives you access to our new Kotlin Apprentice book, which gives you a deep dive into the Kotlin programming language itself. PDF/ePub format.
- A raywenderlich.com subscription ($19.99 value): Gives you access to all 8 of our new Android video courses, our 2 new Android screencasts, and access to any new courses and screencasts we release in the future.
The bundle price of $99.99 includes the first month of your subscription, which will continue at $19.99/month thereafter. You can cancel at any time and keep the books. This bundle gives you more than 20% off everything in the Android Avalanche!
The Android Avalanche bundle is only available for the next two weeks, so be sure to order your copy while you can.
Android Avalanche Giveaway
As a final celebration, we’re going to give away 3 free Android Avalanche bundles to some lucky readers!
To enter the giveaway, simply comment on this post and answer the following question:
We will select three winners at random who answer this question before next Friday, March 30.
Where To Go From Here?
For many years now, readers have been asking for “an Android version of raywenderlich.com”. Thanks to the hard work from our Android team over the last year, we’re happy to announce that this is now a reality!
To recap, here’s the schedule for our two-week Android Avalanche celebration:
- March 19: The Android Apprentice, the Kotlin Apprentice, and Your First Kotlin App Video Course
- March 20: Programming in Kotlin Video Course
- March 21: Your Second Kotlin Android App Video Course
- March 22: Beginning Android Layouts Video Course
- March 23: Beginning RecyclerView Video Course
- March 26: Android Animations Video Course
- March 27: Saving Data on Android Video Course
- March 28: Android Networking Video Course
- March 29: Getting Started with TensorFlow on Android Screencast, and Getting Started with Flutter Screencast
- March 30: Giveaway and Last Day for Discount!
If you want to learn Android and Kotlin development — or level up your existing skills – there’s no better way to learn than these new books, courses, and screencasts.
And this is only the beginning! We’re committed to creating more new books, courses, and screencasts on Android development, with the goal of covering Android and Kotlin in the same way that we’ve covered iOS and Swift over the years.
We truly appreciate your support in making this possible. We’re excited about this new chapter at raywenderlich.com. So order your copy of the Android Avalanche Bundle today before the deal is over!
The post Introducing the Android Avalanche! appeared first on Ray Wenderlich.