Introducing the Android Avalanche!

Our Android Tutorial Team has been amazingly busy over the past year:

• Publicly, we’ve been busy creating more than 40 free Android tutorials for the site, and we’re now releasing a new Android tutorial every Wednesday.
• But secretly, we’ve been cooking up some surprises, including new Android books, and a pile of new Android video courses and screencasts.

Watch out — it’s an avalanche of new tutorials! It’s…an Android Avalanche!

As part of the Android Avalanche, we’re announcing our lineup of new Android books and video courses — and we’ve wrapped them up in a time-limited bundle that you can get at a massive discount.

And best of all – all of these new books, courses, and screencasts are 100% Kotlin! As the second most loved language in the recent StackOverflow Dev survey, the tide is coming! :]

Here’s a quick overview of what’s in store:

• New Android Books
• New Android Video Courses
• New Android Screencasts
• Android Avalanche Bundle
• Android Avalanche Giveaway

New Android Books

To lead off the Android Avalanche, we are releasing two brand-new books on getting started with Android and Kotlin development.

1) The Android Apprentice

The Android Apprentice is our book for complete beginners to Android development. It’s ideal for someone with prior programming experience (like Swift or Java), to get quickly up-to-speed with Android development.

And even better — the book is written in Kotlin, the modern, first-class language for Android developers.

This book teaches you how to build four complete Android apps from scratch:

• Timefighter: You’ll get started with Android development by creating a game with a simple goal: tap a button as fast as you can, within a set time limit.
• CheckList: Make a simple TODO app with multiple lists. Along the way, learn about layout managers, activities, saving data, and notifications.
• PlaceBook: Keep track of your favorite places with photos and maps. Along the way, learn about Google Play services, Room, Google Maps API, and working with photos.
• PodPlay: You’ll round out the book by building a podcast manager with a built-in media player. You’ll cover Android networking, job scheduling, media browser, notifications, and media playback.

The Android Apprentice is 100% complete and is available today — and it’s on sale as part of our Android Avalanche Bundle.

Android Apprentice Authors

Of course, the Android Apprentice would be nothing without the efforts from the hard-working authors on this book:

Darryl Bayliss is a Software Engineer from Liverpool, currently focusing on Mobile Development. Away from programming he is usually reading, writing on his blog or playing some fantastical video game involving magic and dragons.

Tom Blankenship has been addicted to coding since he was a young teenager, writing his first programs on Atari home computers. He currently runs his own software development company focused on native iOS and Android app development. He enjoys playing tennis, guitar, and drums, and spending time with his wife and two children.

2) The Kotlin Apprentice

Heard of Kotlin, but haven’t yet started to learn the language? Or maybe you want to explore some more advanced aspects of the language? Our second book — the Kotlin Apprentice — is here to help you out!

The Kotlin Apprentice is a book geared toward complete beginners to Kotlin. It’s ideal for people with little to no prior programming experience, but it’s also excellent for people who have prior programming experience and are looking to get up-to-speed quickly with the Kotlin language.

The book focuses on the core Kotlin language itself — not building Android apps. If you’re brand-new to Kotlin, we recommend reading this book first, and then working through the Android Apprentice after that.

Here’s a sneak peek of what’s inside:

• Coding Essentials and your IDE: We start you off right at the beginning so you can get up to speed with programming basics. Learn how to work with Intellij IDEA, which you will use throughout the rest of the book.
• Nullability: Kotlin helps you avoid the “billion dollar mistake” by only allowing data to be null if you explicitly allow it.
• Arrays, Lists, Maps, and Sets: Why have only one of a thing when you could have many? Learn about the Kotlin collection types — arrays, lists, maps, and sets — including what they’re good for, how to use them, and when to use each.
• Lambdas: Put code into variables and pass code around to help avoid callback insanity!
• Kotlin and Java Interoperability: Kotlin is designed to be 100% compatible with Java and the JVM. Seamlessly use Kotlin in your Java projects and call back and forth between the languages.
• Kotlin Coroutines: Simplify your asynchronous programming using Kotlin coroutines, and discover the differences between coroutines and threads.
• And much more!: We’ll take you through programming basics, object-oriented programming with classes, exceptions, generics, functional programming, and more!

The early access edition of the Kotlin Apprentice is available today and on sale as part of our Android Avalanche Bundle.

The full edition of the Kotlin Apprentice will be available a little later this year. You’ll get a free update to the full edition of the Kotlin Apprentice as part of your bundle purchase.

Kotlin Apprentice Authors

Here are the hard-working authors who have contributed to the Kotlin Apprentice:

Irina Galata is a software developer in Dnipro, Ukraine. She is passionate about Android, animations, public speeches, and Kotlin. You can find her on Medium and GitHub.

Joe Howard‘s path to software development began in the fields of computational physics and systems engineering. He has been a mobile software developer on iOS and Android since 2009. He now lives in Boston and is Android Team Lead for raywenderlich.com.

Richard Lucas is a developer by trade but adds value any way he can. He is also a writer, podcast host, and advisor at nogradient.com. He thinks most things are superfluous.

Ellen Shapiro is an iOS developer for Bakken & Bæck‘s Amsterdam office who also occasionally writes Android apps. She is working in her spare time to help bring songwriting app Hum to life. She’s also developed several independent applications through her personal company, Designated Nerd Software. When she’s not writing code, she’s usually tweeting about it.