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 looked at how Flutter compares to other mobile app development options. Initially, we explored native development options and using them versus general cross-platform solutions. We saw many of the advantages and disadvantages of the native approach.

We then looked at some common cross-platform frameworks and how they compare to Flutter. We saw that although they are trying to solve the same problem, they are doing so in different ways, leading to different trade-offs against the other options.

Next we explored the Flutter community and highlighted some useful resources. This helped us to understand that the Flutter community is very active, which is a huge positive for the future of Flutter.

One of the key aspects of the community is the plugins that are created. We will explore these further in later chapters.

You should now start to see why Flutter is so awesome, and why it is fast becoming one of the main development options for new app projects...