Chapter 2. Android application fundamentals
In this chapter
- Core building blocks
- The application manifest
- Working with resources, layouts, views, and widgets
- Adapters, intents, and intent filters
I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
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To build solid Android applications you need to start with the basics. It’s the same with learning any technology, skill, or sport. This is the point where a basketball coach would give the speech about learning to dribble and pass, before trying to perfect the alley-oop. Advanced techniques will come, but they’re built on a basis of mastering the fundamentals.
To that end, in this chapter we’ll focus on the core building blocks of Android application development. This means we’ll revisit and expand upon the fundamental concepts we introduced in chapter 1, and we’ll fill in more detail too. Specifically, we’ll take a closer look at the entire scope of an Android application. We’ll start with the manifest and resources, and then we’ll explore layout and views, then activities and intents, and the use of Adapters to bind data to widgets. Finally, we’ll also touch on passing internal data between activities using the Application object. All of these concepts relate to common ways to accomplish basic tasks with the Android platform, and they’re all part of the foundation we need to build before diving deeper in later parts of the book.