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Flutter for Beginners
Flutter for Beginners

Flutter for Beginners: An introductory guide to building cross-platform mobile applications with Flutter and Dart 2

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Flutter for Beginners

An Introduction to Dart

The Dart language is present at the core of the Flutter framework. A modern framework such as Flutter requires a high-level modern language to be capable of providing the best experience to the developer and making it possible to create awesome mobile applications. Understanding Dart is fundamental to working with Flutter; developers need to know the origins of the Dart language, how the community is working on it, its strengths, and why it is the chosen programming language to develop with Flutter. In this chapter, you will review the basics of the Dart language and be provided with some links to resources that can help you on your Flutter journey. You will review Dart built-in types and operators, and how Dart works with object-oriented programming (OOP). By understanding what the Dart language provides, you will be able to comfortably experiment...

Getting started with Dart

The Dart language, developed by Google, is a programming language that can be used to develop web, desktop, server-side, and mobile applications. Dart is the programming language used to code Flutter apps, enabling it to provide the best experience to the developer for the creation of high-level mobile applications. So, let's explore what Dart provides and how it works so we can later apply what we learn in Flutter.

Dart aims to aggregate the benefits of most of the high-level languages with mature language features, including the following:

  • Productive tooling: This includes tools to analyze code, integrated development environment (IDE) plugins, and big package ecosystems.
  • Garbage collection: This manages or deals with memory deallocation (mainly memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use).
  • Type annotations (optional...

Understanding why Flutter uses Dart

The Flutter framework aims to be a game-changer in mobile app development, providing all of the tools needed by the developer to make awesome applications with no drawbacks in performance and scalability. Flutter has, in its core structure, multiple concepts focused on app performance and the user interface. To deliver the best output to the developing world with high performance that compares to the official native SDKs, Flutter uses the support of Dart to provide tools that contribute to developer productivity in the development phase and to build applications optimized for publication.

As we have seen before in the Getting started with Dart section, Dart is mature enough and robust with many tools that contribute to Flutter's success. Let's understand why Dart was the perfect choice for the Flutter framework...

Introducing the structure of the Dart language

If you already know some programming languages inspired by the old C language or have some experience of JavaScript, much of the Dart syntax will be easy for you to understand. Dart provides the most typical operators for manipulating variables. Its built-in types are the most common ones found in high-level programming languages, with a few particularities. Also, control flows and functions are very similar to typical ones. Let's review some of the structure of the Dart programming language before diving into Flutter.

If you already know Dart, you can use this section as a review of the Dart syntax; otherwise, you can check out this introduction and refer to the Dart language tour for a quick and easy learning guide on Dart: https://dart.dev/guides/language/language-tour.

...

Introduction to OOP in Dart

In Dart, everything is an object, including the built-in types. Upon defining a new class, even when you don't extend anything, it will be a descendant of an object. Dart implicitly does this for you.

Dart is called a true object-oriented language. Even functions are objects, which means that you can do the following:

  • Assign a function as a value of a variable.
  • Pass it as an argument to another function.
  • Return it as a result of a function as you would do with any other type, such as String and int.

This is known as having first-class functions because they're treated the same way as other types.

Another important point to note is that Dart supports single inheritance on a class, similar to Java and most other languages...

Summary

We have finished our introduction to the Dart language, and I hope you liked what you have read so far. In this first chapter, we presented the available tools to start your Dart language studies, discovered what a basic Dart program looks like, and learned about the basic Dart code structure. 

We demonstrated how the Dart SDK works, and the tools it provides that help with Flutter app development and make the Flutter framework succeed in its objectives.

We reviewed some important concepts of the Dart language with useful links to the official language guides to support the developer. Additionally, we reviewed functions and parameter specifications, such as named/positional and optional/required, and introduced Dart OOP.

In the next chapter, we will advance toward the OOP concept of programming in the Dart language and its particularities. We will also&...

Further reading

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Key benefits

  • Get up to speed with the basics of Dart programming and delve into Flutter development
  • Understand native SDK and third-party libraries for building Android and iOS applications using Flutter
  • Package and deploy your Flutter apps to achieve native-like performance

Description

Google Flutter is a cross-platform mobile framework that makes it easy to write high-performance apps for Android and iOS. This book will help you get to grips with the basics of the Flutter framework and the Dart programming language. Starting from setting up your development environment, you’ll learn to design the UI and add user input functions. You'll explore the navigator widget to manage app routes and learn to add transitions between screens. The book will even guide you through developing your own plugin and later, you’ll discover how to structure good plugin code. Using the Google Places API, you'll also understand how to display a map in the app and add markers and interactions to it. You’ll then learn to improve the user experience with features such as map integrations, platform-specific code with native languages, and personalized animation options for designing intuitive UIs. The book follows a practical approach and gives you access to all relevant code files hosted at github.com/PacktPublishing/Flutter-for-Beginners. This will help you access a variety of examples and prepare your own bug-free apps, ready to deploy on the App Store and Google Play Store. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with Dart programming and have the skills to develop your own mobile apps or build a career as a Dart and Flutter app developer.

Who is this book for?

This book is for developers looking to learn Google's revolutionary framework Flutter from scratch. No prior knowledge of Flutter or Dart is required; however, basic knowledge of any programming language will be helpful.

What you will learn

  • Understand the fundamentals of the Dart programming language
  • Explore the core concepts of the Flutter UI and how it compiles for multiple platforms
  • Develop Flutter plugins and widgets and understand how to structure plugin code appropriately
  • Style your Android and iOS apps with widgets and learn the difference between stateful and stateless widgets
  • Add animation to your UI using Flutter s AnimatedBuilder component
  • Integrate your native code into your Flutter codebase for native app performance
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Publication date : Sep 12, 2019
Length: 512 pages
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Language : English
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Length: 512 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788996082
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Table of Contents

20 Chapters
Section 1: Introduction to Dart Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
An Introduction to Dart Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Intermediate Dart Programming Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
An Introduction to Flutter Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Section 2: The Flutter User Interface - Everything is a Widget Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Widgets: Building Layouts in Flutter Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Handling User Input and Gestures Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Theming and Styling Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Routing: Navigating between Screens Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Section 3: Developing Fully Featured Apps Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Firebase Plugins Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Developing Your Own Flutter Plugin Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Accessing Device Features from the Flutter App Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Platform Views and Map Integration Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Section 4: Advanced Flutter - Resources to Complex Apps Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Testing, Debugging, and Deployment Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Improving User Experience Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Widget Graphic Manipulations Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Animations Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.9
(11 Ratings)
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4 star 18.2%
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Harold B. Mittiger Mar 31, 2020
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
The author knows how to develop real-world mobile apps using Flutter. If that's what you want to do then this book will provide many valuable insights, save you a great deal of work and ensure that you have a performant product.For example, the chapter on background isolates deals with a vital issue for non-trivial apps (such as those that need networking, e.g. RESTful clients) in a clear and thorough manner. Background isolates are poorly understood by most Flutter developers, not least because the documentation is patchy and lacks a deep exposition (with notoriously hard-to-follow and incomplete online articles): that exposition is provided by the author.Buying this book is a no-brainer.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Emiliano Mar 13, 2021
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Adoro questo libro insieme a quello di Alberto Miola è uno dei migliori testi per flutter oggi sul mercato
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Andrii Halunets Mar 19, 2020
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
The biggest plus of this book is the description of working with isolates and true multithreading in flutter, and not just futures and streams that are not multithreading. This information you never found in any other flutter book.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Roberto Jan 17, 2020
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Perfect for introducing flutter!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
ian schoenrock Feb 19, 2020
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book has a lot of content, especially since flutter is so new it was nice to see that this book covers all the topics you need to know in order to make apps using flutter. Aside from covering everything you need to know in regards to creating meaningful apps, it was also fun to go over machine learning and fire base. As a software developer who uses flutter professionally, I would recommend this to anyone who would like to get started using flutter, or anyone who would like to supplement there existing knowledge of flutter. This book reads great as a page tuner, or as a reference.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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All orders received before 5 PM U.K time would start printing from the next business day. So the estimated delivery times start from the next day as well. Orders received after 5 PM U.K time (in our internal systems) on a business day or anytime on the weekend will begin printing the second to next business day. For example, an order placed at 11 AM today will begin printing tomorrow, whereas an order placed at 9 PM tonight will begin printing the day after tomorrow.


Unfortunately, due to several restrictions, we are unable to ship to the following countries:

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