Kotlin Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide
The day is finally here: our guide to the Kotlin programming language will soon be on store shelves and in your hands, dear reader.
About a year ago, Josh Skeen and I sat down to start work full-time on a guide to the language that we had grown to love.
Kotlin went mainstream in May 2017 thanks to a welcome assist from Google, but Big Nerd Ranch’s Kotlin journey started in 2015 with an internal app called KoffeeKüp.
In our focus on delivering high-quality courses, books, and applications, it sometimes became easy to pass menial tasks like refilling the coffee carafe onto the next under-caffeinated developer.
We needed a way to encourage each other to refill the coffee, and KoffeeKüp was born.
KoffeeKüp provided us with a playground for playing with some of the technologies that were piquing our interest at the time: MVVM, data binding, Slack bots, and most importantly, Kotlin.
From that point forward, we started building internal apps and experiments in Kotlin.
We offered Kotlin work on our consulting projects, and once Google announced their official support, our clients were the ones starting the Kotlin conversation.
The Book
Our books are the result of our combined experience in application development and in teaching our courses.
By the time it gets to you, the content in Kotlin Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide has been taught in numerous classes, where we take your feedback and hear the problems that you’re running into as developers.
In Kotlin Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, we start from core principles that you may know from other languages: basic data types, conditionals, collections etc. and introduce them within the context of the Kotlin programming language.
If you’re a Java developer, some of this will be familiar to you.
Kotlin adds useful twists to these tried-and-true standards; once you use conditional expressions, for example, you’ll see opportunities to clean up lots of existing code.
With that foundation set, we dive deep into object-oriented programming principles in Kotlin.
Kotlin gives you remarkable power in how you initialize objects – we have a whole chapter on it!
You’re not limited to object-oriented programming in Kotlin, though – we’ll also walk through how Kotlin gives you the flexibility to integrate functional programming into your workflow.
Kotlin Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide is platform-agnostic, but we make sure to take some time to highlight common patterns on Android.
There’s so much more to cover, from anonymous functions to extensions and beyond.
We do this all in Big Nerd Ranch’s example-driven style: we introduce concepts within the context of a project that you get to build throughout the book.
If you’ve ever wanted to build your own text adventure, then this is the book for you.
We humbly hope that you love the book as much as we love the language that spawned it.
Our Books
Outside of our bootcamps and corporate training classes, our guides are some of the best resources for programmers looking to jump into mobile app and web development. Designed like our classes, our books provide challenging, accessible, and amazingly practical training to get you writing code quickly and effectively. And what you learn will last you for years to come – even as tooling and languages evolve.
Our new React programming guide covers everything a programmer needs to know about developing applications in React.
This updated guide will walk you through writing your first line of Kotlin code and will guide you through many newer features that developers have been craving, like Coroutines and Multiplatform support.
Through this guide’s carefully constructed explanations and examples, you will develop an understanding of Swift grammar and the elements of effective Swift style – all thoroughly revised for Swift 5.3 and Xcode 12.
Throughout the book, the authors explain what’s important and share their insights into the larger context of the iOS platform. You get a real understanding of how iOS development works, the many features that are available, and when and where to apply what you’ve learned.
Dive in to learn the foundations of Android application development. The content is now in Kotlin and updated with modern Android practices.
Speak with a Nerd
Who Loves Our Books
I’m at Chapter 18 right now and I can attest to the helpfulness of the challenges. The challenges at the end of most chapters help you learn how to explore different parts of Swift and how to debug your programs. This is a super valuable skill and I 100% recommend you do ALL of the challenges.
Matthew Mehrtens on iOs Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (6th Edition)
This is not a super long book. It is pretty readable and has tons of examples. If you want to gain a reasonable knowledge of Swift in order to get going, this is a great book to do so.
Alexander L. Belikoff on Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (2nd Edition)
This is not the lightweight “a few topics in Kotlin” book. This is the manual. It is clear, relatively easy to read given the scope, and useful as a reference once you get done reading it. Best Kotlin book so far.
B. Meike on Kotlin Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide
FAQs About Our Books
Aspiring iOS programmers:
If you don’t have a lot of programming experience, you can begin with Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, which introduces Swift and basic programming principles. Once you’re comfortable with Swift, you can move on to our iOS guide, where you’ll learn how to develop iOS apps using Swift.
Aspiring Android programmers:
If you don’t have a lot of programming experience, you can start with Kotlin Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, which introduces Kotlin and other basic programming principles. Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide continues our tradition of teaching you to write cutting-edge Android applications on a broad range of phones and tablets. It’s completely updated in Kotlin using current Android techniques. Make sure you’re comfortable with the Kotlin language before embarking.
You can ask questions and get help in the Big Nerd Ranch forums. We don’t have official solutions or answers because in real-world programming, there are usually several possible answers. We want you to think like a working programmer and test your own solution. If you’re stuck, have questions, or need any assistance, visit our book forums.
I found a typo or error in my book. Now what?
Thanks for the eagle eye! You can let us know about typos and errata in our forums. You can also submit errata via our publisher Pearson’s website.
We’re just as eager as you are to get our hands on upcoming editions, but we don’t offer pre-releases or beta versions. Keep an eye on our blog for coverage of current topics.
The printed book and its electronic counterpart are separate products, so we can’t offer a discount. We recommend InformIT’s bundle packages, which include the printed book, an EPUB, a Kindle version and a PDF.
We don’t think of our editions as supplements to the original, but as new products altogether. We don’t release new editions unless the changes are substantial enough to be worth the purchase price even to owners of the previous edition.
We’re delighted to hear that you’d like to use our books in your school. We suggest that you contact Pearson, our publisher, to place your order. You can find more detailed information on their website.
Get in touch with our publisher, Pearson, to place your order and to learn about potential bulk discounts. They can be reached at (800) 382-3419 or corpsales@pearsoned.com.
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