Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Third Edition

By : Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek
5 (2)
Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Third Edition

5 (2)
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, solidifying its status as 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. You’ll start with the basics of cross-platform development frameworks, specifically Flutter. You’ll then explore the Dart programming language which is the foundation of the Flutter framework. Next, you’ll get a feel for Flutter and how to create your first app, followed by an exploration of the various popular plugins that supplement the Flutter framework. Finally, you’ll explore testing and app release, including some common glitches that you may experience. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to create and release a basic Flutter app along with gaining a solid understanding of the Flutter framework and Dart language.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1:Learning the Core Concepts
6
Part 2:Building a Basic Flutter App
11
Part 3:Turning a Simple App into an Awesome App
15
Part 4:Testing and Releasing Your App

What is a plugin?

Many programming frameworks and software tools have the concept of plugins. They may go by another name, such as third-party libraries, extensions, or add-ons, but they are effectively the same thing – a self-contained, modular code deliverable that can be “plugged in” to your existing app code to bring extra functionality.

Within this chapter, you will see references to the term packages, which consist of a set of Dart files and optionally some assets, such as images or fonts. A plugin is a special type of package that makes functionality available to your app in a standardized way – this is what we’ll be looking at in this chapter. More specifically, a plugin is used to bridge Flutter with platform-specific native code, allowing access to native functionality, while a package is a collection of Dart and Flutter code that provides reusable functionality within a Flutter project, without any platform-specific dependencies.

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