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

Building Your User Interface through Widgets

In this chapter, we will move beyond the world of pure Dart and into Flutter. One of the key aspects of Flutter is a special type of class called a widget. We will explore what a widget is and the three different types of widgets: stateless, stateful, and inherited. We will explore some of the most common widgets in Flutter, view them in action, and learn how to add them to the Hello World! application you created in Chapter 1, What Is Flutter and Why Should I Use It? Additionally, you will gain an understanding of how layout widgets can help you structure your user interface (UI).

Widgets are classes and objects within the Dart language. Therefore, this chapter will use a lot of the knowledge that you gained in Chapter 4, Dart Classes and Constructs, regarding Dart classes and enums. Armed with this knowledge, we will explore stateful and stateless widgets, which are classes that inherit from specific superclasses and are key to how...