Mastering Kotlin Coroutines for Android Development

Google recommends Kotlin Coroutines as the preferred solution for asynchronous programming on Android. Sooner or later, probably every  Android developer will get in touch with them. This course will provide you with a deep understanding of Kotlin Coroutines and shows how to implement 12+ of the most common use cases for Android applications.

At first, we will take a detailed look at the advantages of Kotlin Coroutines over other approaches for asynchronous programming, like RxJava and Callbacks.

Then, we will talk about some theoretical fundamentals. These include:

• Routines vs. Coroutines

• Suspend Functions

• Coroutines vs. Threads

• Blocking vs. Suspending

• Multithreaded Coroutines

• Internal workings

  
  

Next, we will implement some of the most common use cases for Kotlin Coroutines in Android applications. These include: 

• Performing network requests with Retrofit sequentially and concurrently

• Implementing Timeouts and Retries

• Using Room with Coroutines

• Performing background processing with Coroutines

• Continuing Coroutine execution even when the user leaves the screen.

  
  

To improve your learning experience, this course also challenges you with several exercises.

Learning Coroutines can be overwhelming because you need to learn a lot of new concepts. However, we are going to start simple and as our use cases will get more and more complex, we will learn about new concepts step-by-step. These new concepts are:

• Coroutine Builders (launch, async, runBlocking)

• Coroutine Context

• Coroutine Dispatchers

• Structured Concurrency

• Coroutine Scopes (viewModelScope, lifecycleScope, GlobalScope)

• Jobs and SupervisorJobs

• scoping functions (coroutineScope{} and supervisorScope{})

• Cooperative Cancellation

• Non-Cancellable Code

We will also make a deep dive into Exception Handling and discuss concepts like: 

• exception handling with try/catch

• exception handling with CoroutineExceptionHandlers

• when to use try/catch and when to use a CoroutineExceptionHandler

• exception handling in Coroutines started with launch and async

• exception handling specifics of scoping functions coroutineScope{} and supervisorScope{}

Unit Tests are very important for every codebase. In the final section of the course we will write unit tests for most of the coroutine-based use cases we implemented earlier. We will discuss concepts like

• TestCoroutineDispatcher

• creating a JUnit4 Rule for testing coroutine-based code

• runBlockingTest{} Coroutine Builder

• virtual time

• Testing sequential and concurrent execution

• TestCoroutineScope

By the end of this course, you will have a fundamental understanding of Kotlin Coroutines and are able to write readable and maintainable, asynchronous and multithreaded Android Applications.