Dart

 Flutter and Dart have emerged as a powerful duo that empowers developers to create stunning and feature-rich apps for Android, iOS, and web platforms from a single codebase. By leveraging Flutter's rich set of customizable widgets and Dart's reactive programming model, you can create visually appealing and interactive user interfaces that feel native on both iOS and Android devices.

 This book adopts a hands-on approach to help you progress from fundamental to advanced concepts in Flutter development, establishing a solid foundation along the way. It will teach you how to create elegant user interfaces, utilize Flutter's Widget library, and incorporate captivating animations for enhanced user experience. It will also guide you through building apps that work seamlessly on all supported Flutter platforms, saving you time and effort. Additionally, you'll explore state management techniques for efficient app state handling and scalable applications. Following that, the book explores the process of connecting REST APIs and seamlessly integrating Firebase into your Flutter applications. It also includes testing and debugging techniques to ensure code quality and reliability. Lastly, it will guide publishing and distributing your app, covering code signing, release management, and app distribution to app stores.

 By the end of this book, you will have the confidence and expertise to develop cross-platform apps efficiently.

What you will learn

• Get familiar with different features of the Dart programming language.
• Learn how to leverage the vast collection of pre-built widgets provided by Flutter.
• Get tips to enhance the security of your Flutter app.
• Learn how to implement basic and advanced animations in Flutter.
• Explore various state management techniques in Flutter.

Who this book is for

 This book is for beginner and experienced developers who aspire to master Flutter and advance their cross-platform app development skills. It is also for mobile app developers who wish to harness Flutter's capabilities for creating apps across multiple platforms. Additionally, web developers interested in transitioning into mobile app development using the Flutter framework will find valuable insights.

 Flutter and Dart are quickly becoming the go-to tools for building scalable native mobile apps. Whether you're a beginner looking to get started with mobile development or an experienced developer looking to add Flutter and Dart to your toolkit, this book has something for you.

 In this practical guide, you'll learn everything you need to know to get started with Flutter and Dart and build your cross-platform mobile apps. The book starts with an overview of the Flutter and Dart framework. It then takes you through the basics of app development, and gives you a solid foundation to build upon. The book then focuses on how to design and build user interfaces with Flutter, including how to use widgets, layouts, and themes. It then helps you understand how to manage app state and handle data in Flutter, as well as how to optimize performance and integrate with native code. In addition to the core concepts, the book covers advanced topics to help you build robust and reliable apps. Lastly, it explores real-world case studies and examples of Flutter and Dart apps, providing inspiration and guidance for your projects.

 By the end of the book, you'll be able to build stunning multi-platform mobile apps with Flutter and Dart.

What you will learn

● Learn how to design and build user interfaces with Flutter.
● Discover techniques for managing app state and handling data in Flutter.
● Learn how to use Flutter and Dart for network programming and asynchronous programming.
● Get tips for testing and debugging Flutter and Dart apps.
● Explore best practices for optimizing app performance and integrating with native code.

Who this book is for

 This book is for Mobile app developers, Cross-platform developers, and App developers who want to build and deploy cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart.

 There are many programming languages you can start learning today.

 But not many are modern, easy to learn, object-oriented and scalable as Dart. Plus, combined with Flutter, it allows you to build native iOS & Android applications with a single code base.

 Dart Apprentice will teach you all the basic concepts you need to master this language. Follow along the easily and thoroughly explained concepts and you will be building Dart applications in a breeze.

 Most of the chapters in this book build on the ones that precede it, so you’ll find it easiest to understand if you progress through the chapters in order.

 For readers coming from Dart Apprentice: Fundamentals, you’ll learn the most by following along and trying each of the code examples, exercises and challenges as you come to them. The way to learn to code is by writing code and experimenting with it. That can’t be emphasized enough.

 More advanced readers may want to skim the content of this book to get up and running quickly. If that’s you, try the challenges at the end of every chapter. If they’re easy, move on to the next chapter. If they’re not, go back and read the relevant parts of the chapter and check the challenge solutions.

 Finally, for all readers, Kodeco is committed to providing quality, up-to-date learning materials. We’d love to have your feedback. What parts of the book gave you one of those aha learning moments? Was some topic confusing? Did you spot a typo or an error? Let us know at forums.kodeco.com and look for the particular forum category for this book.

 Dart is a modern and powerful programming language. Google intentionally designed it to be unsurprising. In many ways, it’s a boring language, and that’s a good thing! It means Dart is fast and easy to learn. While Dart does have some unique characteristics, if you have any experience with other object-oriented or C-style languages, you’ll immediately feel at home with Dart. Even if you come here as a complete beginner to programming, Dart is a good place to start. The concepts that you’ll learn in this book will give you a solid foundation for your coding career.

 There’s a good chance you picked up this book because you want to make a Flutter app, and you heard you needed to learn Dart. It was no accident that Flutter chose Dart as its language. The Dart virtual machine allows lightning-fast development-time rebuilds, and its ahead-of-time compiler creates native applications for every major platform. As one of the most versatile languages on the market today, you can use Dart to write anything from command-line apps and backend servers to native applications for Android, iOS, web, Mac, Windows, Linux and even embedded devices.

 It’s no wonder then that developers across the world have taken notice. Rather than completely rewriting the same application in different languages for multiple platforms, developers save countless hours by using a single language and a shared codebase. This translates to a win for companies as well because they save money without sacrificing speed.

 The chapters in this book build on each other, so most readers will want to progress through the content in a linear manner.

 Most chapters begin by introducing a data structure or algorithm with examples and illustrations. This is to help you gain a high-level conceptual understanding before diving into the code. Adventurous readers may wish to pause at this point and try to implement the data structure or algorithm on their own before looking at how the chapter does it. Even if you’re not successful, attempting to solve the problem will almost certainly cause you to have a deeper understanding of the requirements. An alternative strategy is to work through each chapter directly. Then, when finished, delete all of the code you copied and try to reproduce the data structure or algorithm based on your understanding.

 You’ll find challenge problems at the end of many chapters. These will help to test your understanding of what you learned. Try to solve the challenges yourself before looking at the answers. When you need to look, you can find the solutions at the end of the book or in the supplemental downloadable materials that accompany the book.