Foreword

One of the things the Flutter team is deeply grateful for is the supportive community of Flutter developers. For nearly any question you may have, you can find an answer on Stack Overflow, Medium, or even someone’s GitHub account. Many answers come with fully working sample code with a license that lets you use the code right in your application. We see this spirit of cooperation and camaraderie as crucial to making you successful with Flutter.

Until now, though, there’s been little material that you can actually hold in your hands and work through at your desk or in the evenings as you learn how to use Flutter. While blogs, Medium, and online documentation have been a paradigm shift for book publishers, especially in computing, there’s still a need for long-form material on topics, and Flutter is no exception.

This is why this book is so important. There are things you can’t get from a five-hundred-word Medium post or a snippet of code on Stack Overflow. Thinking deeply about things like how your application manages its state requires you to understand the platform deeply. In this book, you’ll not only see how to use Flutter, but you’ll understand why using Flutter in the ways Eric and people online say to actually works in practice.

Eric covers many of the things that developers have found challenging when moving to Flutter. Between these pages you’ll learn about how layout works, how to build widgets that interact with users, and how to build complex applications that span multiple pages and carry complex application sate. For users new to Dart, there’s an entire chapter on how Dart handles asynchronicity. Because today’s mobile applications are communicating applications, you’ll also see how to handle JSON with HTTP backends, and as a bonus, how to use Firestore to manage data storage. And, to wrap things up, there’s a whole chapter on testing.

Throughout, Eric’s taken the time to explain not just what, but why. I urge you to do the same—while you can dip in and out of a chapter to get just the morsel of information you need, why not pause for a minute and savor the experience of actually holding this book and going deeper? Doing so will make you a better programmer with Flutter and pay dividends elsewhere in your life as you slow down and remember how to not just learn, but master a new technology.

I and the entire Flutter team are excited to see what you build with Flutter. Thank you for trusting us with your ideas.

—RAY RISCHPATER
TECHNICAL PROGRAM MANAGER, FLUTTER
GOOGLE