PragProg Customers Kotlin and Android Development: pg. 8 Build Gradle error: Could not get unknown property 'kotlin_version'

Hey Dave!
This was a fun change Google made just after the book was published: the kotlin_version property is no longer automatically included when you create a project.

What used to happen is that you’d get a buildscript { ... } block in your project-level build.gradle file with an ext { ... } inside. This block contained any variables you wanted to use in your Gradle scripts.

You can either create this section in that project-level build.gradle file:

buildscript {
    ext {
        kotlin_version = '1.7.10'
        // Other variables can live here
    }
    // Other blocks can be here
}

Otherwise, you can change the kotlin-stdlib-jdk8 dependency to include the Kotlin version rather than use the variable:
implementation "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jdk8:1.7.10"

Also, with newer versions of Kotlin, you should be able to exclude the explicit Kotlin dependency altogether.

Let me know if that works!
Michael