Flutter for Beginners: An introductory guide to building cross-platform mobile applications with Flutter 2.5 and Dart

by Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek, Trevor Wills (Foreword)

Develop the real-world experience you need to build and launch your own Flutter apps with this full-color guide 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, making it 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. This book will guide you through developing your first app from scratch all the way to production release. Starting with the setup of your development environment, you'll learn about your app's UI design and responding to user input via Flutter widgets, manage app navigation and screen transitions, and create widget animations. You'll then explore the rich set of third party-plugins, including Firebase and Google Maps, and get to grips with testing and debugging. Finally, you'll get up to speed with releasing your app to mobile stores and the web. By the end of this Flutter book, you'll have gained the confidence to create, edit, test, and release a full Flutter app on your own. This book is for developers looking to learn Google's revolutionary framework Flutter from scratch. No prior knowledge of Flutter or Dart is required.

370 pages, Paperback

Published October 18, 2021

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book can't decide who it's for - total beginners, or developers with experience in other frameworks.

If it's meant for beginners, the coverage of Dart and Flutter is very shallow. Most topics get only half a page. Basics like loops and functions are barely explained. Arrow functions are used later but never introduced - confusing for anyone new to Dart.

If it's meant for experienced developers, then the language should be more mature. Is Stream an implementation of the Observable design pattern? How does Flutter build and rebuild the widget tree - is it anything like React's virtual DOM? Does this constant rerendering risk memory leaks? Should we unsubscribe from Streams? And so on...

This is a book about programming, there should be more code, right? Routing and animations are only lightly touched on. There are references to GitHub examples, but that doesn't really make up for the lack of hands-on content.

Architecture is completely ignored - What are the best practices for folder structure? No talk of separating UI and business logic layers. Maybe some DI practices could help with maintainability and testing in isolation?

Some chapters feel like redundant fillers - comparisons with other hybrid app frameworks, chapter about versioning, some third-party plugins could have been excluded, etc.

There are also quite a few errors - from typo "a sync" instead of "async" to mismatched class names. It needed more polish.

This book is 400 pages long, and you can pack a ton of useful content into that space. But as it stands, it's mostly surface-level and leaves both beginners and experienced developers frustrated.

The structure itself is quite good and could've been the foundation of a great book - if it had been extended to 500 pages, with fewer fluff sections, and more valuable, technical content. A third edition could be worth reading.

[Matthew Horvat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a good introduction to Flutter and Dart. I felt after reading this I could build small Flutter apps, but I would have rather seen the book lengthened a little and containing a bigger section on the Dart language.