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 5: Widgets – Building Layouts in Flutter

In this chapter, you will learn what a widget is and the three different types of widgets: stateless, stateful, and inherited. You will explore some of the most common widgets in Flutter, view them in action, and learn how to add them to your application. Additionally, you will gain an understanding of how layout widgets can help you to structure your user interface (UI).

Widgets are classes and objects within the Dart language. Therefore, this chapter will use a lot of the knowledge that you gained in Chapter 4, Dart Classes and Constructs, regarding Dart classes and enums. Armed with this knowledge, we will explore Stateful and Stateless widgets, which are classes that inherit from specific superclasses and are key to how you manage the UI of your app.

Next, we will take a closer look at the built-in widgets that come as part of the Flutter framework and cover most of your UI needs. It is useful to be aware of what is...