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Android Programming for Beginners

You're reading from   Android Programming for Beginners Build in-depth, full-featured Android apps starting from zero programming experience

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Product type Paperback
Published in Apr 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781800563438
Length 742 pages
Edition 3rd Edition
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Author (1):
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John Horton John Horton
Author Profile Icon John Horton
John Horton
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Table of Contents (30) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Chapter 1: Beginning Android and Java 2. Chapter 2: First Contact: Java, XML, and the UI Designer FREE CHAPTER 3. Chapter 3: Exploring Android Studio and the Project Structure 4. Chapter 4: Getting Started with Layouts and Material Design 5. Chapter 5: Beautiful Layouts with CardView and ScrollView 6. Chapter 6: The Android Lifecycle 7. Chapter 7: Java Variables, Operators, and Expressions 8. Chapter 8: Java Decisions and Loops 9. Chapter 9: Learning Java Methods 10. Chapter 10: Object-Oriented Programming 11. Chapter 11: More Object-Oriented Programming 12. Chapter 12: The Stack, the Heap, and the Garbage Collector 13. Chapter 13: Anonymous Classes – Bringing Android Widgets to Life 14. Chapter 14: Android Dialog Windows 15. Chapter 15: Arrays, Maps, and Random Numbers 16. Chapter 16: Adapters and Recyclers 17. Chapter 17: Data Persistence and Sharing 18. Chapter 18: Localization 19. Chapter 19: Animations and Interpolations 20. Chapter 20: Drawing Graphics 21. Chapter 21: Threads and Starting the Live Drawing App 22. Chapter 22: Particle Systems and Handling Screen Touches 23. Chapter 23: Supporting Different Versions of Android, Sound Effects, and Spinner Widget 24. Chapter 24: Design Patterns, Multiple Layouts, and Fragments 25. Chapter 25: Building a Simple Image Gallery App 26. Chapter 26: Advanced UI with Navigation Drawer and Fragment 27. Chapter 27: Android Databases 28. Chapter 28: A Quick Chat before You Go 29. Other Books You May Enjoy

All the Android UI elements are classes too

When our app is run and the setContentView method is called from the onCreate method, the layout is inflated from the XML and instances of the UI classes are loaded into memory as usable objects. They are stored in a part of the memory called the heap. The heap is managed by the Android Runtime (ART) system.

Re-introducing references

But where are all these UI objects/classes? We certainly can't see them in our code. And how on earth do we get our hands on them?

The ART inside every Android device takes care of memory allocation to our apps. In addition, it stores different types of variables in different places.

Variables that we declare and initialize in methods are stored on the area of memory known as the Stack. We can stick to our existing warehouse analogy when talking about the Stack. We already know how we can manipulate variables on the Stack with straightforward expressions. So, let's talk about the heap...

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