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

Getting started with Dart

Let’s start by looking at some of the high-level aspects of the Dart language. Many languages borrow the best parts of languages that came before them, and Dart is no different in that regard. Dart aims to aggregate the benefits of many of the existing high-level languages that have mature language features, including the following:

  • Productive tooling: This includes tools to analyze code, IDE plugins, and big package ecosystems. A language will struggle and fail if there isn’t great tooling available to developers.
  • Garbage collection: This manages or deals with memory deallocation (mainly memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use). Java was one of the first high-level languages to use this approach, and it is now a common approach for languages to take. The Dart garbage collector is designed to be fast and not impact the user experience.
  • Statically typed: Dart is type-safe and uses both static type checking and runtime...