Simone Alessandria - Flutter Cookbook: Over 100 proven techniques and solutions for app development with Flutter 2.2 and Dart

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To Renata and Giusy, the two wonderful ladies that are my past, present, and future.

Simone Alessandria wrote his first program when he was 12. It was a text-based fantasy game for the Commodore 64. Now, he is a trainer (MCT), author, speaker, passionate software architect, and always a proud coder. He is the founder and owner of Softwarehouse.it. His mission is to help developers achieve more through training and mentoring. He has authored several books on Flutter, including Flutter Projects, published by Packt, and web courses on Pluralsight and Udemy.

Brian's career had him working on video games, eCommerce, productivity, finance, and travel apps. After spending years working as an iOS and Android developer, he sees Flutter as the next big pillar for mobile.

Luke Greenwood is a freelance software developer with over 5 years of experience in the industry, a master's degree in computer science, and a passion for Flutter. Having started his mobile development career with native Android, he soon discovered the potential of cross-platform development, first through Xamarin Forms and then later with Flutter. He has since been working exclusively with Flutter and has produced large-scale production apps across a variety of domains. He has also published articles and hosted webinars on how to make the most of the SDK.

This book contains over 100 short recipes that will help you learn Flutter by example. These recipes cover the most important Flutter features that will allow you to develop real-world apps. In every recipe, you will learn and immediately use some of the tools that make Flutter so successful: widgets, state management, asynchronous programming, connecting to web services, persisting data, creating animations, using Firebase and machine learning, and developing responsive apps that work on different platforms, including desktop and the web.

Flutter is a developer-friendly, open source toolkit created by Google that you can use to create applications for Android and iOS mobile devices, and now that Flutter 2.2 has been released, you can also use the same code base for the web and desktop.

There are 15 chapters in this book, which you can read independently from one another: each chapter contains recipes that highlight and leverage a single Flutter feature. You can choose to follow the flow of the book or skip to any chapter if you feel confident with the concepts introduced in earlier chapters.

Flutter uses Dart as a programming language. , Dart: A Language You Already Know, is an introduction to Dart, its syntax, and its patterns, and it gives you the necessary knowledge to be productive when using Dart in Flutter.

In later chapters, you'll see recipes that go beyond basic examples; you will be able to play with code and get hands-on experience in using basic, intermediate, and advanced Flutter tools.

This book is for developers who are familiar with an object-oriented programming language. If you understand concepts such as variables, functions, classes, and objects, this book is for you.

Prior knowledge of Dart is not required as it is introduced in , Dart: A Language You Already Know.

If you already know and use languages such as Java, C#, Swift, Kotlin, and JavaScript, you will find Dart surprisingly easy to learn.

, Getting Started with Flutter, will help you set up your development environment.

, Dart: A Language You Already Know , introduces Dart, its syntax, and its patterns.

, Introduction to Widgets , shows how to build simple user interfaces with Flutter.

, Mastering Layout and Taming the Widget Tree , shows how to build more complex screens made of several widgets.

, Adding Interactivity and Navigation to Your App , contains several recipes that add interactivity to your apps, including interacting with buttons, reading a text from a TextField, changing the screen, and showing alerts.

, Basic State Management , introduces the concept of State in Flutter: instead of having screens that just show widgets, you will learn how to build screens that can keep and manage data.

, The Future Is Now: Introduction to Asynchronous Programming, contains several examples of one of the most useful and interesting features in programming languages: the concept of the asynchronous execution of tasks.

, Data Persistence and Communicating with the Internet , gives you the tools to connect to web services and persist data into your device.

, Advanced State Management with Streams , shows how to deal with Streams, which are arguably the best tool to create reactive apps.

, Using Flutter Packages , teaches you how to choose, use, build, and publish Flutter packages.

, Adding Animations to Your App , gives you the tools you need to build engaging animations in your apps.

, Using Firebase , shows how to leverage a powerful backend without any code!

, Machine Learning with Firebase MLKit , shows how to add machine learning features to your apps by using Firebase.