Flutter For Dummies

Introduction

On December 5, 2018, at an annual developers’ event in London, Google announced the release of Flutter 1.0. Between December 5 and the end of December, the number of page visits to the official flutter.io website jumped from 2.3 million to 4.7 million. In the following year, the number of posts about Flutter on the Stack Overflow developers’ website increased by 70 percent, exceeding the count of posts about React Native — the most popular alternative to Flutter.

Companies such as Capital One, Alibaba, Groupon, and Philips Hue use Flutter to develop mobile apps. The official app for the musical Hamilton is written using Flutter. Google’s next mobile operating system, code-named Fuchsia, is based on Flutter. An estimated 200 million users run apps written in Flutter. More than 250,000 developers write Flutter code, and the Google Play Store has over 3,000 Flutter apps.

Are you interested in developing Flutter apps? If so, you’re in good company.

How to Use This Book

You can attack this book in either of two ways: Go from cover to cover or poke around from one chapter to another. You can even do both. Start at the beginning and then jump to a section that particularly interests you. This book was designed so that the basic topics come first, and the more-involved topics follow them. But you may already be comfortable with some basics, or you may have specific goals that don’t require you to know about certain topics.

In general, my advice is this:

• If you already ...