Just as Apple is moving iOS developers from Objective-C to Swift, Google is moving Android developers from Java to Kotlin. And now it’s offering two Kotlin on Android courses online for free via a partnership with Udacity.

“Google and Udacity currently offer video-based courses for Kotlin Bootcamp and How to build Android apps in Kotlin,” a new post to the Android Developers Blog reads. “To help people that learn in different ways, we have recently reworked these courses to publish them as tutorial-based Codelab courses. More than 2.5 million users have worked through Google Codelabs like this just this year.”

The two courses are:

Kotlin Bootcamp Course. In this course, you will learn everything you need to program in Kotlin, beginning with the basics such as how to write Kotlin statements, and working up to functional manipulation such as extending built-in functions. This bootcamp course gives you the Kotlin foundation you’ll need to take the Android Kotlin Fundamentals course to learn how to build Android apps in Kotlin.

Android Kotlin Fundamentals Course. Android Kotlin Fundamentals leads you through a series of Codelabs that teach you the fundamentals of building Android apps in Kotlin. This course takes you from “Hello World” to connecting with the world.

The two courses are part of Codelabs, Google’s free developer resource. According to the site, each codelab provides “a guided, tutorial, hands-on coding experience. Most codelabs will step you through the process of building a small application, or adding a new feature to an existing application. They cover a wide range of topics such as Android Wear, Google Compute Engine, Project Tango, and Google APIs on iOS.”

And for those unfamiliar with Kotlin, Google is moving away from Java, and it has adopted Kotlin as its preferred programming language moving forward. Like Java, Kotlin is an object-oriented C-like language, and it’s a nice drop-in replacement for Java because it also runs in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) environment used by Android. Kotlin is open-source and free of the legal issues that have plagued Google since Oracle took control of Java with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Tagged with Kotlin