Preface

It's only been a few years since the Dart programming language was born and it has become eminent and well-known not only within Google, but also in the wider community of developers. It has grown into a powerful tool to help developers produce efficient and consistent source code for web clients and standalone and server-side programs. The Dart development team and independent contributors have created some good documentation, so getting started with programming using Dart isn't that hard. You can program within different development environments such as the Eclipse-based Dart Editor; IDE plugins for IntelliJ IDEA and WebStorm; and text editor plugins for Sublime Text 3, Emacs, and Vim.

Actual development on Dart is quite similar to Java, C#, or any other object-oriented languages, so you can have your first short application up and running in a short amount of time. To go further, you can use the tutorials, code labs, and examples on the official Dart website (https://www.dartlang.org/). If you want to improve your level of expertise, you can read through the set of books on Dart that have been published in the last couple of years. You should always bear in mind that creating high-level, secure, and internationally compliant code is more complex than the application created in the beginning.

This book is designed to help you make the most effective use of the Dart programming language, its SDK libraries, and a rich set of publicly available packages. Feel free to refer to any chapter that you need to get more in-depth knowledge about. If you feel you have missed something major, go back and read the earlier chapters. The chapters in the book are arranged in such a way that you can easily learn more in a step by step manner.

I enjoy working with the Dart programming language and am really happy to share my enthusiasm and expertise with you to help you make use of the language in a more effective and comfortable manner.