|
Flutter Apprentice |
Flutter Apprentice Book Details
Title: Flutter Apprentice
Author: By Michael Katz, Kevin David Moore & Vincent NgoLanguage: EnglishNo. of pages: 660Format: PDF, EPUB
Introduction
Welcome to Flutter Apprentice!
Flutter is an incredible user interface (UI) toolkit that lets you build apps for iOS and
Android — and even the web and desktop platforms like macOS, Windows and Linux
— all from a single codebase.
Flutter has all the benefits of other cross-platform tools, especially because you’re
targeting multiple platforms from one codebase. Furthermore, it improves upon
most cross-platform tools thanks to a super-fast rendering engine that makes your
Flutter apps perform as native apps.
In addition, Flutter features are generally independent of native features, since you
use Flutter’s own type of UI elements, called widgets, to create your UI. And Flutter
has the ability to work with native code, so you can integrate your Flutter app with
native features when you need to.
If you’re coming from a platform like iOS or Android, you’ll find the Flutter
development experience refreshing! Thanks to a feature called “hot reload”, you
rarely need to rebuild your apps as you develop them. A running app in a simulator
or emulator will refresh with code changes automatically as you save your source
files!
In this book, you’ll see how to build full-featured Flutter apps, gain experience with a
wide range of Flutter widgets and learn how to deploy your apps to mobile app
stores.
How to read this book
In the first section of the book, you’ll learn how to set up a Flutter development
environment. Once that’s done, you’ll start building your first Flutter app.
The next two sections focus on UI development with Flutter widgets. You’ll see just
how impressive Flutter user interfaces can be.
The fourth section switches to building a new app. You’ll use it to learn about using
networking and databases with Flutter, as well as the all-important topic of state
management.
The fifth section shows you how to incorporate platform-specific assets into your
app, then demonstrate how to deploy your apps to the mobile app stores.
The book’s final section focuses on how to interact with Firebase Cloud Firestore.
Here’s a breakdown of these five main sections of the book:
Section I: Build Your First Flutter App
The chapters in this section introduce you to Flutter, get you up and running with a
Flutter development environment and walk you through building your first Flutter
app.
You’ll learn about where Flutter came from and why it exists, understand the
structure of Flutter projects and see how to create the UI of a Flutter app.
You’ll also get your first introduction to the key component found in Flutter user
interfaces: widgets!
Section II: Everything’s a Widget
In this section, you’ll start to build a full-featured recipe app named Fooderlich.
You’ll gain an understanding of the wide range of widgets available in Flutter and
put them to use. Then you’ll learn the theory of how widgets work behind the scenes.
Finally, you’ll dive deeper into layout widgets, scrollable widgets and interactive
widgets.
Section III: Navigating Between Screens
You’ll continue working on the Fooderlich app in this section, learning about
navigating between screens and working with deep links.
Topics you’ll learn include Navigator 2.0 and Flutter Web.
Section IV: Networking, Persistence & State
Most apps interact with the network to retrieve data and then persist that data
locally in some form of cache, such as a database. In this section, you’ll build a new
app that lets you search the Internet for recipes, bookmark recipes and save their
ingredients into a shopping list.
You’ll learn about making network requests, parsing the network JSON response and
saving data in a SQLite database. You’ll also get an introduction to using Dart
streams.
Finally, this section will dive deeper into the important topic of app state, which
determines where and how to refresh data in the UI as a user interacts with your app.
Section V: Deployment
Building an app for your own devices is great; sharing your app with the world is
even better!
In this section, you’ll go over the steps and processes to release your apps to the iOS
App Store and Google Play Store. You’ll also see how to use platform-specific assets
in your apps.
Section VI: Working With Firebase Cloud
Firestore
Synching data with the cloud is a very common feature of any mobile app.
In this section you’ll learn how to leverage the power of Firebase Cloud Firestore to
build an instant messaging application.