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

Technical requirements

In this chapter, we will create, build, and run a Flutter application. To do this, you will need to set up your system so that it is capable of doing this.

Specifically, you will need to set up your system to have the following:

  • A Flutter software development kit (SDK) installed and added to your PATH
  • An integrated development environment (IDE) where you can view and edit Flutter code
  • Android Studio and/or Xcode so that you can use the Android and iOS development tools and iOS simulators/Android emulators

The chapter will give you some guidance on how to set up your system, but as you will discover, the Flutter documentation is excellent and includes very accurate and up-to-date getting started guides: https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/install.

Feel free to set up your system now or at the specific points required during the chapter.

You can find the source code for this chapter on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Flutter-for-Beginners-Second-Edition/tree/main/hello_world/lib/chapter_01.