What this book covers
Chapter 1, Best Practices for Building UIs with Flutter, discusses the difference between imperative and declarative approaches to UI building and why modern frameworks prefer the latter. We will explore the details of the Flutter widget tree system, and practical advice on how to build performant interfaces.
Chapter 2, Responsive UI for All Devices, provides an overview of the Flutter layout algorithm, dives into the best practices and available options for building responsive interfaces, and covers accessibility best practices.
Chapter 3, Vanilla State Management, opens the topic of state management in Flutter. It provides the definition of state and its different types. In this chapter, we start building the Candy Store app, which we will continue building throughout the book, and learn how to implement state management patterns in the vanilla Flutter way. You will also see an overview of the InheritedWidget class details, and practical tips on working with BuildContext in Flutter.
Chapter 4, State Management Patterns and Their Implementations, continues the topic of state management, introducing popular industry patterns such as MVVM and MVI, the rationale behind using them, and their implementation in Flutter with and without third-party libraries.
Chapter 5, Creating Consistent Navigation, provides an overview of navigation patterns in Flutter, going into details on how to implement imperative style navigation and declarative style navigation. We will see some examples of building complex navigation scenarios and when to choose which approach.
Chapter 6, The Responsible Repository Pattern, introduces the Repository pattern and its benefits for scalable app architecture. The chapter goes deep into implementation details and explores practices for building flexible data sources.
Chapter 7, Implementing the Inversion of Control Principle, explores various approaches to implementing the Inversion of Control principle, via practices such as dependency injection and the Service Locator pattern, and demonstrates their practical application with the help of different libraries.
Chapter 8, Ensuring Scalability and Maintainability with Layered Architecture, provides an overview of how to structure the code that we have built up to this point according to layered architecture principles. The chapter also highlights how we have been following the SOLID and other best software design principles all along.
Chapter 9, Mastering Concurrent Programming in Dart, introduces concepts related to concurrent programming in general and provides an overview of asynchronous APIs in Dart. The chapter goes into details of how to work efficiently with the Future APIs, as well as how to handle parallel operations with the Isolates API.
Chapter 10, A Bridge to the Native Side of Development, provides an overview of the Flutter app architecture from the perspective of the SDK and hosting platforms. The chapter goes into details of working with platform channels, a mechanism used to communicate with the host platform, as well as demonstrating the shortcomings of this API. We then explore a type-safe way to implement that communication via the pigeon code generation library.
Chapter 11, Unit Tests, Widget Tests, and Mocking Dependencies, provides an overview of the automated testing approaches in Flutter. You will learn how to write unit tests and go into the details of widget testing. The chapter showcases the mocking dependencies technique and how to implement it with the Mockito library.
Chapter 12, Static Code Analysis and Debugging Tools, discusses the topic of static analysis in Flutter and why it’s important to establish coding conventions and follow them consistently. We then see how this can be automated by setting up a robust static analysis system. The chapter also explores debugging practices and their applications, such as logging, assertions, breakpoints, and Flutter DevTools.
