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

Unit testing

It is generally agreed that writing bug-free software is impossible, especially when your code runs on third-party hardware, such as a mobile phone, and has to interact with users, who can (and will) do all kinds of unexpected things.

However, for some situations, such as reusable function libraries, the requirements can be well defined, and the data inputs known in advance. In these situations, not only is a strong set of tests a great way to ensure the library is as bug-free as possible, but it also allows you to make changes to the code (for example, performance improvements, memory optimizations), knowing that your changes have not affected the expected behavior of the library.

Unit tests are one of the things that can help us to write modular, efficient, and bug-free code. The unit test is not the only way of testing code, of course, but it's a crucial part of testing small pieces of software in a manner that isolates it from other parts, helping us to...