Developing applications for the Android mobile operating system can seem daunting, particularly if it requires learning a new programming language: Kotlin, now Android's official development language. With this practical book, Android developers will learn how to make the transition from Java to Kotlin, including how Kotlin provides a true advantage for gaining control over asynchronous computations.
Authors Pierre-Olivier Laurence, Amanda Hinchman-Dominguez, G. Blake Meike, and Mike Dunn explore implementations of the most common tasks in native Android development, and show you how Kotlin can help you solve concurrency problems. With a focus on structured concurrency, a new asynchronous programming paradigm, this book will guide you through one of Kotlin's most powerful constructs, coroutines.
- Learn about Kotlin essentials and the Kotlin Collections Framework
- Explore Android fundamentals: the operating system and the application container and its components
- Learn about thread safety and how to handle concurrency
- Write sequential, asynchronous work at a low cost
- Examine structured concurrency with coroutines, and learn how channels make coroutines communicate
- Learn how to use flows for asynchronous data processing
- Understand performance considerations using Android profiling tools
- Use performance optimizations to trim resource consumption