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 learned about unit testing Dart so that we can be confident that our library functions are following the requirements under a range of data inputs.

We saw an introduction to Flutter widget tests and how they can be used to test widgets individually. We looked at how they are structured with the WidgetTester class in the testWidgets function.

We also saw how to debug our app, first by looking at the Dart Observatory and the method calls of debugging and assertions, and then by using the debugging facilities of the IDE.

Finally, we investigated how we can use Flutter DevTools to explore the widget tree in debug mode and application performance in profile mode.

In the next chapter, we will finish the journey of our app by looking at how we can release it into the world for everyone to use!