Coding All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2

Setting Up Your Computer for Mobile App Development

IN THIS CHAPTER

Installing Dart and Flutter

Installing a development environment

Mimicking mobile devices on your laptop computer

Tools don't directly do the things you want done. You can't eat a tool, read a good tool, hear a tool's happy song, or dance the jig with a tool. But you can use tools to make food, books, musical instruments, and dance floors.

This chapter is all about tools — the tools you use to make great mobile apps.

The Stuff You Need

This book tells you how to create apps using Flutter. Before you can create apps, you need some software tools. Here's a list of the tools you need:

• The Flutter Software Development Kit (SDK)

  The Flutter SDK includes lots and lots of prewritten, reusable Flutter code and a bunch of software tools for running and testing Flutter apps. The SDK has the official Flutter code libraries, Dart code libraries, documentation, and even some sample apps.

• An integrated development environment

  You can create Flutter apps by using geeky, keyboard-only tools, but eventually you'll tire of typing and retyping commands. An integrated development environment (IDE), on the other hand, ...