It's only been a few years since the Dart programming language was born and it has become eminent and well-known not only within Google, but also in the wider community of developers. It has grown into a powerful tool to help developers produce efficient and consistent source code for web clients and standalone and server-side programs. The Dart development team and independent contributors have created some good documentation, so getting started with programming using Dart isn't that hard. You can program within different development environments such as the Eclipse-based Dart Editor; IDE plugins for IntelliJ IDEA and WebStorm; and text editor plugins for Sublime Text 3, Emacs, and Vim.
Actual development on Dart is quite similar to Java, C#, or any other object-oriented languages, so you can have your first short application up and running in a short amount of time. To go further, you can use the tutorials, code labs, and examples on the official Dart website (https://www.dartlang.org/). If you want to improve your level of expertise, you can read through the set of books on Dart that have been published in the last couple of years. You should always bear in mind that creating high-level, secure, and internationally compliant code is more complex than the application created in the beginning.
This book is designed to help you make the most effective use of the Dart programming language, its SDK libraries, and a rich set of publicly available packages. Feel free to refer to any chapter that you need to get more in-depth knowledge about. If you feel you have missed something major, go back and read the earlier chapters. The chapters in the book are arranged in such a way that you can easily learn more in a step by step manner.
I enjoy working with the Dart programming language and am really happy to share my enthusiasm and expertise with you to help you make use of the language in a more effective and comfortable manner.
Chapter 1, Beyond Dart's Basics, helps you take a step further to understand the concept of programming in the Dart language. It shows the best practices to use functions and closures and dives into the world of classes and mixins.
Chapter 2, Advanced Techniques and Reflection, lets you get a firm grasp on how to use generics, errors and exceptions, and annotations, and it takes you through Mirrors of reflection.
Chapter 3, Object Creation, helps you understand how objects can be created and will help you make a right choice that will be useful in different business cases.
Chapter 4, Asynchronous Programming, explores advanced technologies to organize asynchronous code execution. It shows you the best practices of Future, zones, and isolates.
Chapter 5, The Stream Framework, shows you how Dart manages streams. It teaches you how the single-subscription and broadcast streams can be used in different cases and scenarios.
Chapter 6, The Collection Framework, introduces you to the Dart collection frameworks. It shows which data structure of a collection is appropriate in specific cases based on patterns and performance consideration.
Chapter 7, Dart and JavaScript Interoperation, shows you how to use Dart and JavaScript together to build web applications. It lists problems and shows solutions you can use to communicate between Dart and JavaScript and the existing JavaScript program.
Chapter 8, Internalization and Localization, explains you how the i18n and l10n access can be embedded into your code to help you design and develop web applications that enable easy localization for different cultures, regions, and languages.
Chapter 9, Client-to-server Communication, helps you organize and create client-to-server communications. It has the answer on presumably the most important questions about the right choice of libraries and packages in specific scenarios.
Chapter 10, Advanced Storage, explains how can store data locally on a client, break the storage limits, and prevent security issues in your web applications. It will again touch upon cookies and demonstrate how to use Web Storage and the elaborate, more powerful, and more useful IndexedDB to store a large amount of data in the web browser.
Chapter 11, Supporting Other HTML5 Features, introduces you to different HTML5 features such as notifications, native drag-and-drop, geolocation, and canvas.
Chapter 12, Security Aspects, helps you understand the different aspects of security in web applications.