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 have explored the concept of screens within an app and seen how to add navigation between them. First, we got to know the Navigator widget, the main player when it comes to navigation in Flutter. We have seen how it composes the navigation stack or history by using the Overlay class.

We have also seen another important piece of navigation, Route, and how to define it for use in our applications. We checked out different approaches to implement the navigation, with the most typical way being with the MaterialPageRoute widget.

We also explored the new Navigator 2.0 approach to get a feel for how this declarative approach to screen management contrasts with the Navigator 1.0 imperative approach.

Finally, we briefly explored app state management and some of the common approaches. This is a rich area that you should explore when you become more confident with Dart and Flutter.

In the next chapter, we start to look at another part of the framework...