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

Popular Third-Party Plugins

In the previous chapter, we learned about what a plugin is and how it is used, and we experimented with our first plugin.

Flutter has a rich set of plugins, and sometimes, it can be hard to know where to start from; you don’t know what you don’t know! This chapter will highlight some of the most popular plugins and give an overview of their uses.

We will start this chapter by looking into the Firebase plugins. Firebase is a set of services available on Google Cloud that you can use to create apps with advanced features. This includes authenticating users, storing data, sending push notifications, and analyzing app usage, among many other features.

We will then look at how to use Google Places for map and location information. Many apps have address lookups or show locations on a map, and the Google Places plugins help here.

Next, we will look at plugins that exercise the capabilities of the device the app is being used on, including...