raywenderlich Tutorial Team - Kotlin Apprentice: Beginning Programming with Kotlin

By Irina Galata, Joe Howard, Dick Lucas & Ellen Shapiro

By Irina Galata, Joe Howard & Ellen Shapiro

Copyright 2019 Razeware LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book or corresponding materials (such as text, images, or source code) may be reproduced or distributed by any means without prior written permission of the copyright owner.

This book and all corresponding materials (such as source code) are provided on an as is basis, without warranty of any kind, express of implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and noninfringement. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the software or the use of other dealing in the software.

All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing in this book are the property of their own respective owners.

Irina Galata is an author of this book. is a software engineer in Linz, Austria, working at Runtastic. She passionate about programming and exploring new technologies. You can follow her on twitter @igalata13.

Joe Howard is an author and final pass editor of this book. Joe is a computational physicist who studied particle physics using parallel Fortran simulations. He gradually shifted into systems engineering and ultimately software engineering around the time of the release of the iOS and Android SDKs. He's been a mobile software developer on iOS and Android since 2009, working primarily at two agencies in Boston, MA since 2011. He's now the Android Pillar Lead for raywenderlich.com. Twitter: @orionthewake.

Ellen Shapiro is an author of this book. works for Apollo GraphQL, caring and feeding for their iOS SDK. She's been building iOS and Android apps since late 2010, and has written and edited tutorials and books about iOS and Android for RayWenderlich.com since 2013. Shes also developed several independent applications through her personal company, Designated Nerd Software. When she's not writing code, she's usually tweeting about it at @DesignatedNerd.

Wed also like to acknowledge the efforts of the authors of the Swift Apprentice and previous editions of Kotlin Apprentice whose work formed the basis for parts of this book:

• Janie Clayton is an independent iOS developer. She spent a year apprenticed to a super genius programming robots and learning the forgotten ways of long term software maintenance and development. Janie is the coauthor on several books on iOS and Swift development. Janie lives outside of Madison, Wisconsin with her attempted grumble of pugs and multitude of programming books. Janie writes her various musings on her blog at RedQueenCoder.com.

• Alexis Gallagher is a software engineer who is always looking for the conceptual deep dive and always hoping to find pearls down at the bottom. When hes not coding, hes out and about in sunny San Francisco.

• Matt Galloway is a software engineer with a passion for excellence. He stumbled into iOS programming when it first was a thing, and has never looked back. When not coding, he likes to brew his own beer.

• Eli Ganim is an engineering manager at Facebook. He is passionate about teaching, writing, and sharing his knowledge with others.

• Erik Kerber is a software developer in Minneapolis, MN, and the lead iOS developer for the Target app. He does his best to balance a life behind the keyboard with cycling, hiking, scuba diving, and traveling.

• Ben Morrow delights in discovering the unspoken nature of the world. Hell tell you the surprising bits while on a walk. He produces beauty by drawing out the raw wisdom that exists within each of us.

• Cosmin Pupz is a software developer and tutorial writer from Romania. He has worked with more than a dozen programming languages over the years, but none of them has made such a great impact on himself as the advent of Swift. When not coding, he either plays the guitar or studies WWII history. Cosmin blogs about Swift at cosminpupaza.wordpress.com.

• Steven Van Impe is a computer science lecturer at the University College of Ghent, Belgium. When hes not teaching, Steven can be found on his bike, rattling over cobblestones and sweating up hills, or relaxing around the table, enjoying board games with friends. You can find Steven on Twitter as @svanimpe.

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

Vicki Wenderlich is the designer and artist of the cover of this book. She is Rays wife and business partner. She is a digital artist who creates illustrations, game art and a lot of other art or design work for the tutorials and books on raywenderlich.com. When shes not making art, she loves hiking, a good glass of wine and attempting to create the perfect cheese plate.

"To my fiance Lilia, for all her support, encouragement, and patience. Love you. "

Ellen Shapiro

"To my loved ones for their support."

Irina Galata

"To Lauren."

Joe Howard

The Kotlin language has been around since 2011, but its popularity took off in 2017 when Google announced Kotlins inclusion as a first-class language for Android development. In 2019, Google announced a "Kotlin-first" approach to Android development. With modern and expressive language characteristics such as those found in Apples Swift, and 100% interoperability with Java, its no wonder that Kotlin has been named a top 5 most-loved language by Stack Overflow users.

If you're a complete beginner to programming, this is the book for you! There are short exercises and challenges throughout the book to give you some programming practice and test your knowledge along the way.

Through Kotlin Apprentice, you'll learn about basic things like constants, values and types, move up to more complicated items such as data structures, classes and enumerators, and finish off with some in-depth knowledge about functional programming, coroutines, and Kotlin Multiplatform.

If you want to get right into Android app development after you work through Kotlin Apprentice, we suggest you read the Android Apprentice, available on our store: