The purpose of this book is to guide a reader through the capabilities of Kotlin language and give examples of how to use it for the development of various applications, be it desktop, mobile or Web. Although our primary focus is on JVM and Android, the knowledge we’re sharing here, to various extents, applies to other Kotlin-supported platforms such as JavaScript, native and even multi-platform applications.
The book starts with an introduction to the language and its ecosystem, which will give you an understanding of the key ideas behind the Kotlin design, introduce you to the Kotlin tooling and present you the basic language syntax and constructs. In the next chapters, we get to know the multi-paradigm nature of Kotlin which allows us to create powerful abstractions by combining various aspects of functional and object-oriented programming. We’ll talk about using common Kotlin APIs, such as the standard library, reflection, and coroutine-based concurrency as well as the means for creating your own flexible APIs based on domain-specific languages. In the concluding chapters, we give examples of using Kotlin for more specialized tasks, such as testing, building Android applications, Web development and creating microservices.