Flutter For Dummies

Although I've worked through Udemy tutorials, so I had some understanding of Dart and Flutter beforehand this book is easy to understand and shows a logical flow of concepts. Plus the code actually works the first time through. Definitely more value than I expected. I will by Barry Burds other books just because he actually makes sense.

simple to understand the basics

Personal interest.

I've read a few "for dummies" books and have not been impressed. I keep with the publisher "No Starch Press" sometimes "Packt" (Packt didn't impress me a few years ago, but they seem to be picking better authors and the quality of their books are getting better). For short books, I stopped buying "for dummies" and go with the "In Easy Steps" series of books. Especially for teenagers, as they have a lot of color pictures to help with learning. I couldn't find a good Dart/Flutter book. The only one was from Packt and I hadn't decided if I wanted to learn, yet, another computer language. I didn't want to invest in a $50 book until I was sure. The only other 5-star book was this one, Flutter For Dummies. I'm so glad I picked it up. The quality of this book was surprising. It was well written and easy to understand. I would give it five stars, but it's the first edition, it was published in 2019, and it's not 2023. It's pretty out of date. Especially, since Flutter is a fairly new language and changes often. A second edition is needed. The only thing about this book that I would change is the IDE the author uses in the book. You can tell the author is a huge Google fan. And, Flutter is of course a "Google" creation (I use rabbit ears to show loosely it's a Google creation as it's really the two individuals that created Flutter) the author uses the Android IDE. If you are going to write a book for the masses, you should look at what the masses are using. Overall, the most used IDE is VSCode. Don't get me wrong, I love JetBrains PyCharm which I'm a user of, I don't have a problem with the Android IDE, but when writing a book for the masses it should be tailored to what most developers use to help with the learning process, and in this instance it's VSCode. I hope the second edition will be using VSCode and not the Android IDE. Also, Flutter supports both Android and iOS. That's why I'm learning Flutter and why people are being pulled to Flutter. Code once for all platforms. There is only one example for iOS. The rest is all android. There should be more examples of iOS using Cupertino design and not all around Googles Material design. But, overall, the book will get you up and running Dart/Flutter quickly and efficiently. I have no regrets purchasing this book. Two weeks into having this book, and I'm already developing an app that interfaces into my Django API website for ALL platforms (Windows, Mac, Linus, iOS, and Android) how awesome is that!?

I just started learning. Good book, I recommend reading.

I wanted to learn Flutter very quickly. After doing the Dart language tour online, I made it through this whole book in less than a week, and then took an online Flutter Udemy course. This book is a decent Intro to Flutter, but it is not at all comprehensive. The examples that the author goes through are extremely basic. You do not make any apps with this book, but you've got to start somewhere.

This books gives a basic overview of flutter and is pleasantly readable. But there’s a serious flaw. The way Flutter expects programmers to manipulate the interface is very different from most other programming paradigms, that is, the state management. Specifically, Flutter often expects to redraw the widgets every time there is a change in their onscreen representation. This whole concept is mostly missing from this book, so you’d really come away from this book without really knowing how to use it do make real world applications.

For Dummies books of the past were always approachable without being patronizing and were great at getting you from nothing to something in a linear fashion. Unfortunately this book does not carry on that tradition.Parts 3 and 4 of the book finally start teaching you how to do things with Flutter and Dart. The first two parts are the author's attempts at making the topic approachable, but only come across as patronizing. He also sticks to poor analogies which only end up making the points he's trying to make more confusing. The first two parts of the book should ideally be edited into a single part with less verbosity and less repetition of largely identical content. I should have heeded the other reviewers' warnings about skipping the book and just viewing tutorials online.