Preface

Kotlin is evolving rapidly as a universal language—a single language with which one can do many things and do it elegantly! It can be used to create a wide range of applications, spanning from large server applications that can take advantage of the most modern advances in parallel processing and rich internet applications (RIA) that run in the ecosystem of a web browser to Android apps and tiny applications that run within tiny IoT processors.

In May 2017, when Google announced official support to Kotlin to develop Android applications, the status of Kotlin was elevated overnight from a nice, cool language to a language that needs to be taken seriously. Shortly thereafter, the Spring framework, which is mighty on the server-side development, added Kotlin-only features. The Kotlin-favoring trend seems to have continued since then.

The vast array of applications that Kotlin can be used in and the value-add that Kotlin does in each of the cases with Kotlin-specific flavors can be quite overwhelming. This book is written to help the programmers find these in one place so as to put their hands around the perse use case scenarios.

While there are books and plenty of online material covering the language basics, and then there are those covering single niche areas, there was nothing that could be referred to for understanding the vast spectrum of usage scenarios. This book tries to fill the void. This is a single book that can be used as a reference to these various scenarios.

This is not a theory book. It is a practical guide to creating industry-grade applications with Kotlin. Each chapter takes one moderately sized requirement in a given area and shows how to create a Kotlin application to fulfill it. It contains a complete set of instructions that a programmer can follow and learn the applications by coding them first hand. It also highlights the special uses of Kotlin features as they are applicable to the problem at hand.

Except for the first introductory chapter, all other chapters are independent of one another. You can, therefore, jump straight to the chapter corresponding to the application area that would be the most relevant for you, and pe deep into it to learn the skill quickly and put it to practice. It, thus, helps in accelerating your understanding and increasing the productivity in a short time.

We hope that the fast-growing community of Kotlin programmers will find this book immensely useful.