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

Make me pretty

In Chapter 5, Building Your User Interface through Widgets, we had a look at the Text, Image, and Container widgets and how they can be used to manage the layout of child widgets. We only briefly looked at how to manage the appearance of those widgets, so now is the time to delve a little deeper. However, before we do that, let’s briefly learn how to use colors in Flutter.

Using colors

Anytime you want to change the color of a widget, you will need to understand how to use the Color class. There are a few options available and, often, you will just choose for convenience.

The easiest option is to use the Colors abstract class, which holds lots of predefined colors. You have probably seen this being used in previous chapters as a way to give color to widgets. Take a look at the Colors class documentation to see all the predefined colors, which includes transparency: https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/Colors-class.html.

To use the Colors class...