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

Understanding Google Maps and Places

You will have likely used Google Maps for navigation, but the use of Google Places is not so obvious. This is generally used when you enter an address into a text box, and while you are entering it, there are suggestions for the full address.

Simply put, Google Places is where you find an address, and Google Maps is where you display that address. Many plugins support Google Maps and Places, so when choosing, make sure you look at the pub.dev scores.

A very good Google Maps plugin is google_maps_flutter, which was created by the Flutter development team. In pub.dev, you can click on the author – in this case, flutter.dev –and view all the plugins that the development team has created. Looking through the flutter.dev team’s plugins is a great way to get a feel for all the different plugins available.

There are plugins for Google Places, but an alternative is the google_maps_webservice plugin, which is a wrapper on the...