Tag Archives: Android courses

New! Android Kotlin codelab courses are here

Posted by Jocelyn Becker, Senior Program Manager, Google Developer Training

Want to learn to build Android apps in Kotlin? Get started with the Kotlin Bootcamp for Programmers and Developing Android apps in Kotlin codelabs courses.

Google and Udacity currently offer video-based courses for Kotlin Bootcamp and How to build Android apps in Kotlin. To help people that learn in different ways, we have recently reworked these courses to publish them as tutorial-based codelab courses. More than 2.5 million users have worked through Google codelabs like this just this year.

Kotlin Bootcamp

Google provides first class support for building Android apps in Kotlin, including Kotlin-friendly Android APIs and API extensions. Kotlin fully interoperates with the Java programming language and libraries, and is included with IntelliJ and Android Studio.

In the Kotlin Bootcamp course, you will learn everything you need to program in Kotlin, beginning with the basics such as how to write Kotlin statements, and working up to functional manipulation such as extending builtin functions.

If you already know how to program, the Kotlin Bootcamp provides the foundation you'll need to build Android apps in Kotlin.

Start the Kotlin Bootcamp now!

Building Android apps in Kotlin

When you feel comfortable with Kotlin, you can dive right into building Android apps. This course takes you from "Hello World" to connecting with the world. You start building a basic interactive user interface on one screen, and end with a multi-screen Google Developer Group (GDG) Finder app that gets data from a live server on the internet. In between, you learn about Android Jetpack components, such as Room for databases, Work Manager for background processing, the Navigation component, and more. You'll use popular community libraries to simplify common tasks, such as Glide for image loading, Retrofit for networking, and Moshi for JSON parsing. The course teaches key Kotlin features such as coroutines to help you write your app code more quickly and concisely.

In each lesson, you will work with a realistically architected app and implement key features. For example, you start out learning how to deploy a dice roller app. You learn how to implement navigation by building the "Android Trivia" game. You learn how to create a Room database by building a sleep tracker app.

Overall, you will create and work with more than 10 apps, so, by the end of this course, you will have a portfolio of example code that you can use to realize your own amazing app ideas!

Get started now!

Android codelab courses are here!

Posted by Jocelyn Becker, Senior Program Manager, Google Developer Training

The Google Developers Training team recently published an updated version of our Android Developer Fundamentals course as a series of Google codelabs.

Android Developer Fundamentals course landing page

Codelabs made their debut as onsite tutorials at Google I/O in 2015, and have skyrocketed in popularity as a way for developers to learn how to use Google technologies, APIs, and SDKs. A codelab is a short, self-contained tutorial that walks you through how to do a specific task. More than 2 million users have worked through Google codelabs this year.

Our Android courses were originally intended as classroom-based courses. However, we found that many people work through the courses on their own, outside of formal teaching programs. So, when we updated the Android Developer Fundamentals course, in addition to supporting classroom-based learning, we made the material available as a sequential series of codelabs.

Android Developer Fundamentals course

The updated Android Developer Fundamentals (V2) course includes lessons on using the Room database and other Architecture Components. All the apps have been updated to reflect that the Empty Activity template in Android Studio uses ConstraintLayout, and we've updated all apps to a later version of Android Studio. For more details on the differences, see the release notes.

Advanced Android course

We've also re-published the Advanced Android Developer course as a series of codelabs. This course provides step-by-step instructions for learning about more advanced topics, and adding features to your app to improve user engagement and delight. Learn how to add maps to your apps, create custom views, use SurfaceView to draw directly to the screen, and much more.

Screenshots for apps that display a customized map marker, a customized fan controller view, and an Android hiding in the dark

Teaching materials for both courses

Android logo wearing graduation cap

If you want to teach either course in the classroom, or use it as the basis of a study jam, the complete package is still available, including slide decks, source code in GitHub, and concept guides, in addition to the step-by-step codelabs.