Beginning Flutter (Wrox) |
Author: Marco L. Napoli Flutter is Google's SDK for writing mobile apps using the Dart language. It needs a good book - does this one fit the bill? I have looked through many books on Flutter. Many are written like a reference where Flutter widgets are listed followed by a description of all the properties and methods. Such books make it difficult to even get interested in Flutter, let alone program in it. Then there are books that do better by showing a group of related widgets with sample code that uses them. But that code block often fills more than a page and the explanation that follows is verbose. It can quickly become confusing and tiring to keep up with.
The book "Beginning Flutter" is different. It introduces concepts to you in a logical order and there is a try-it-out block after each concept that instructs you to code little-by-little with a top-down approach, for example explaining why you are adding a new child widget and what it will do. I like this approach which is followed in all the chapters. I can see that for Flutter and its widgets, somehow the top-down approach to introduce code works better as compared to the traditional bottom-up approach.
Then there are new concepts that the book explains well. For example, I was not familiar with mixin and could not understand the term as described in another Flutter book. But I got the concept of mixin alright in this book.
I want to make one thing clear though. Since I'm coming from a programming background, my objective in reading the book was to get the concepts of Flutter and its language, Dart. I haven't actually tried out the code examples so I don't know if all of its sample code is verified and correct and works out of the box.
As far as the title goes, while this book is indeed for "Beginning Flutter" it does assume a programming background. But please don't misread the title of this book to mean "Beginning Programming with Flutter." Flutter is not something to start with when learning to program.
The only thing I disliked about the book was its section on creating the Hello World App. It does much more than create a simple app and unnecessarily goes into things like themes and packages that do not belong in that beginning chapter. In fact, it might scare away some readers, thinking the book is too complex. I advise you to skip that chapter in the beginning and go straight to "Learning Dart Basics."
Finally, the book is not just about "Beginning Flutter." It also covers information on more advanced concepts like "writing platform native code." Moreover, it develops a full-fledged Journal app in the final chapters and as a result has many practical tips and useful pointers. In that sense, the book has so much information that it's valuable to keep as a reference too.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 05 December 2020 ) |