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

Getting started with Dart

Dart aims to aggregate the benefits of most of the high-level languages with mature language features, including the following:

  • Productive tooling: This includes tools to analyze code, IDE plugins, and big package ecosystems.
  • Garbage collection: This manages or deals with memory deallocation (mainly memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use).
  • Type annotations (optional): This is for those who want security and consistency to control all of the data in an application.
  • Statically typed: Although type annotations are optional, Dart is type-safe and uses type inference to analyze types at runtime. This feature is important for finding bugs during code compilation.
  • Portability: This is not only for the web (transpiled to JavaScript) but it can also be natively compiled to Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) and x86 code.

All Flutter development involves having intimate knowledge of the Dart language; your application code, plugin...