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 classes in Dart

If you are an experienced programmer and are already familiar with Java or similar OOP languages, then you can skim through some parts of this chapter as Dart implements OOP concepts such as inheritance and encapsulation in very similar ways to those other languages. However, some areas, such as how Dart manages and defines class constructors, will probably be different from what you are used to and are incredibly important for later chapters when we explore how Flutter makes the best use of the Dart language.

In this section, we will look at what makes a Dart class, how to construct an instance of one using a constructor, and how your class can inherit from other classes. We will also explore ways to use special class constructs, such as abstract classes, interfaces, and mixins, and, finally, look at how to share class code across our code base using files and imports.

Class structure

Dart classes are declared by using the class keyword and the...