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

Unit testing

It is generally agreed that writing bug-free software is impossible, especially when your code runs on third-party hardware, such as a mobile phone, and needs to interact with users, who can (and will) do all kinds of unexpected things.

For some situations, such as reusable function libraries, the requirements can be well defined, and the data inputs and outputs known in advance. In these situations, not only is a strong set of tests a great way to ensure the library is as bug-free as possible, but you can make changes to the code (for example, performance improvements and memory optimizations), knowing that your changes have not affected the expected behavior of the library.

Unit tests are one of the tools that can help us write modular, efficient, and bug-free code. A unit test, as the name implies, tests the smallest logical unit of code that can be meaningfully executed in isolation. The unit test is not the only way of testing code, of course, but it’...