Introducing Kotlin

Kotlin’s popularity exploded in 2017, when Google announced official support for Kotlin development for Android apps. Whether you are looking to use Kotlin for Android app development or for other sorts of projects, you have chosen one of the fastest-growing languages and one with a tremendous amount of “buzz”.

This book will help you get up to speed on the core aspects of Kotlin, plus help you understand unusual Kotlin syntax that you will encounter from time to time.

Why?

Kotlin is most often compared to Java. Kotlin was originally created to serve as a Java replacement, though that story has gotten somewhat more complicated. Also, Java was the preeminent language for Android app development, and so many developers are coming to Kotlin having had some amount of Java experience.

Compared to Java, Kotlin has less “ceremony”. It is designed to allow code to be concise, with fewer characters used to express the same programming algorithms. For example, Java and many other programming languages (e.g., C, C++) use a semicolon (;) to designate the end of a statement. In Kotlin, the semicolon usually is optional. That is a small change in syntax, but Kotlin is full of these sorts of smaller changes, each providing you with more results with less actual code.