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

Chapter 4: Dart Classes and Constructs

In this chapter, we will look at object-oriented programming (OOP) and how it is supported by the Dart language. We will start by looking at the core principles of OOP with relation to the Dart language, and then explore how to use OOP within Dart.

We will then take a deeper look at class definitions and how instances of a class are created, including an exploration of the constructor types available, which forms a key part of the way Flutter apps are coded. Additionally, we will look at how we store our code in files, and how to import code from other files.

Finally, we will look at some key Dart topics that are used throughout Flutter—generics and asynchronous programming. These will help with your understanding of the Flutter topics we will cover later in the book.

On completion of this chapter, you will have a solid foundational knowledge of Dart, which will set you in good stead as we move to a deeper exploration of Flutter...