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

How do I add a plugin to my project?

Adding a plugin to your project is generally surprisingly easy. However, it is crucially important that you read the README fully because, for some plugins, there can be platform-specific configurations that you need to set up before the plugin will run. In some extreme cases (such as google_mobile_ads), your app will completely fail to start unless the plugin setup has been completed correctly.

We will use the example of auto_size_text as a plugin we wish to add. We saw the README for this plugin, but let’s look at the Installing section now. The following screenshot shows the instructions for installation:

Figure 9.3 – The auto_size_text plugin’s installation instructions

Figure 9.3 – The auto_size_text plugin’s installation instructions

There are two ways to add a plugin to your project, but the outcome is the same.

The first option is to run a flutter command on the command line to do all the work for you:

flutter pub add auto_size_text

The other...