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

Summary

In this chapter, we have explored the concept of plugins and what they are. We have explored the benefits of using plugins, and also some of the drawbacks that you need to be aware of.

We have investigated how you can find plugins and what to look for when choosing a plugin from the many that may be available. Specifically, we looked at pub.dev and all the information available on there to make using plugins easy.

We looked at how to add a plugin to your project, how to manage versions within the pubspec.yaml file, and how to use the plugin within your code.

Finally, we saw some of the common issues that can be encountered when using plugins and some suggestions for how to resolve them.

In the next chapter, we will look at some of the common plugins that are used in projects. This will give you an idea of the different areas of your project where plugins can be useful and highlight the most popular plugins with Flutter.