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

Variables and data types

Variables are key to any programming language, holding application state so that the correct execution flow can be followed, displaying the correct information to the user, and interacting with other systems through defined data structures.

Unstructured data can be dangerous, though, and may lead to bugs and difficult-to-maintain code. Therefore, a rich set of data types is required in a modern programming language. Let's explore this area of the Dart language, starting with the basics of declaring a variable.

Variable declaration

Variables store references to data and are key to decision making within your application. Variables have to be declared before they can be used.

A variable declaration follows many of the rules of similar programming languages, but due to type inference, Dart variable declaration can be looser.

The structure of a variable declaration is shown here:

type identifier = value;

type defines the data type that...