It’s day 4 of the Android Avalanche: an event where we’ll be releasing new Android and Kotlin books, courses, and screencasts every day!
Today, we are releasing a brand new course: Beginning Android Layouts.
In this 29-video 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 about the view hierarchy, basic layout types, the powerful ConstraintLayout, and using the design and XML editors in Android Studio.
Take a look at what’s inside:
Part 1: Introduction to Android Layouts
In part one, learn how view layout and the view hierarchy works in Android.
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Introduction: Find out what’s covered in our Beginning Android Layouts video tutorial series.
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Building the Starter App: Download the starter app and build it in Android Studio, and take a peek at the included starter layout files.
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ViewGroups and Layout Editors: Learn about the foundation of all Android layouts, the ViewGroup class, and explore the layout editors in Android Studio.
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The View Hierarchy: Be introduced to the concept of the view hierarchy, and begin your study of layouts by seeing how to define view widths and heights.
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Sizes, Margins, and Padding: Learn how to specify size units in Android, and use those size units to space views via margins and padding.
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Challenge: Padding: Practice adding padding to a view, through a hands-on challenge.
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Conclusion: Let’s review what you’ve covered in this first section, and discuss what’s next.
Part 2: Basic Layout Types
In the second part, learn how to use the basic layout types: RelativeLayout and LinearLayout.
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Introduction: Let’s review the basic layout types that you’ll learn about in this section.
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RelativeLayout: Learn about how to use the RelativeLayout ViewGroup to position sibling views with specific relationships to one another.
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Gravity and Cleanup: Learn how to align elements using the layout_gravity and gravity tags, and do some code and design cleanup.
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Challenge: Relative Layout: Practice creating a RelativeLayout, through a hands-on challenge.
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LinearLayout: Learn about how to use the LinearLayout ViewGroup to position views along a horizontal or vertical dimension.
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Layout Weights: Discover how to use layout_weight with LinearLayout, in order to divide the shared size between sibling views in a specific ratio.
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Challenge: LinearLayout: Practice creating a LinearLayout, through a hands-on challenge.
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FrameLayout: Learn about how to use the FrameLayout ViewGroup to create a layering of views, and how to switch between the layers.
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Challenge: FrameLayout: Practice creating an empty state using FrameLayout, through a hands-on challenge.
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Conclusion: Let’s review what you learned about the basic layout types, and discuss what’s next.
Part 3: ConstraintLayout
In part 3, learn how to use the complex but powerful ConstraintLayout.
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Introduction: Let’s review what you’ll be learning in this section by introducing ConstraintLayout and constraints.
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Converting to ConstraintLayout: Use the converter built-in to Android Studio to convert an existing layout to ConstraintLayout.
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Editing Controls: Create a new ConstrainLayout from scratch, utilizing the layout editor editing controls
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Challenge: Converting a Layout: Practice converting an existing layout to ConstraintLayout, through a hands-on challenge.
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Challenge: Hiding Empty Views: Practice programmatically hiding empty views in a ConstraintLayout, through a hands-on challenge.
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Conclusion: Let’s review what you’ve learned about ConstraintLayout, and discuss what’s next.
Part 4: Configuration Changes
In part 4, learn to use both the design editor and XML editor in Android Studio.
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Introduction: Let’s discuss why it’s important to handle both portrait mode and landscape mode device configurations.
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Resource Qualifiers: Learn about how resource qualifiers are used to handle different device densities and also for localization.
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Landscape Mode: See how to create a layout file tailored specifically for when the device is in the landscape orientation.
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Challenge: Landscape Mode: Practice creating a landscape mode layout, through a hands-on challenge.
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The Great Flattening: Remove all of the nested layouts in an existing layout to create a completely flat ConstraintLayout.
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Conclusion: In this final episode, you’ll get a summary of the course as well as see an overview of Android layout topics that were not covered.
The Android Avalanche Bundle
If you like this course, from now until March 30th you can get it along with the rest of our new Android and Kotlin books, courses, and screencasts — 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.
Where To Go From Here?
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!
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