Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Second Edition

By : Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek
Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Second Edition

By: Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek

Overview of this book

There have been many attempts at creating frameworks that are truly cross-platform, but most struggle to create a native-like experience at high performance levels. Flutter achieves this with an elegant design and a wealth of third-party plugins, making it the future of mobile app development. If you are a mobile developer who wants to create rich and expressive native apps with the latest Google Flutter framework, this book is for you. This book will guide you through developing your first app from scratch all the way to production release. Starting with the setup of your development environment, you'll learn about your app's UI design and responding to user input via Flutter widgets, manage app navigation and screen transitions, and create widget animations. You'll then explore the rich set of third party-plugins, including Firebase and Google Maps, and get to grips with testing and debugging. Finally, you'll get up to speed with releasing your app to mobile stores and the web. By the end of this Flutter book, you'll have gained the confidence to create, edit, test, and release a full Flutter app on your own.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Flutter and Dart
6
Section 2: The Flutter User Interface – Everything Is a Widget
10
Section 3: Developing Fully Featured Apps
14
Section 4: Testing and App Release

How do I add a plugin to my project?

Adding a plugin to your project is generally surprisingly easy. However, it is crucially important that you read the readme fully because for some plugins, there can be platform-specific configuration that you need to set up before the plugin will run. In some extreme cases (such as google_mobile_ads), your app will completely fail to start unless the plugin setup has been completed correctly.

We will use the example of auto_size_text as a plugin we wish to add. We saw above the readme for this plugin, but let's look at the Installing section now. The following screenshot shows the instructions for installation:

Figure 8.3 – The auto_size_text installation instructions

There are two ways to add a plugin to your project, but the outcome is the same.

The first option is to run a flutter command on the command line to do all the work for you:

flutter pub add auto_size_text

The other option is to replicate...