Beginning App Development with Flutter: Create Cross-Platform Mobile Apps (Paperback)

Section: Introduction to Flutter

1.     Hello Flutter

• Brief chapter overview and roadmap

• The Dart language itself - There's an overview and cheatsheet in the Appendix
• Deploying to a store
• Device-specific programming

• Who's a good fit and who is not
• Where to go to satisfy the prerequisites

• Problems it solves
Where it came from - Brief history and origins

• What other options are available? What might you use if not Flutter? Advantages and disadvantages of Flutter vs the other options
• React Native
• Progressive Web Apps
• WebView solutions (Ionic, etc.)
• Truly native coding (Swift, Objective-C, Java, Kotlin)

• This ain't the web!
• Imperative UI
• You're writing using Dart
• Everything is a widget (Define widgets and explain the big win of widgets)
• Widgets composition
You have to watch state

2.     How do I develop in Flutter?

• Chapter synopsis: Flutter has a unique set of tools but it isn't always straightforward what each tool does and how to use it. This chapter guides the reader through the process of write-debug-test-run.
• Installing Flutter tooling - A very brief and high-level coverage of where to get the tools. It should be brief because the details are likely to change regularly.
• Overview of each tool
• The emulators
• iOS simulator through XCode
• Android emulator through Android Studio
• The IDE - Visual Studio Code
• Alternatives: Android Studio, Atom, jBoss, etc.
• The Flutter CLI
• How to check and repair your toolchain through Flutter doctor
• How to scaffold a new app
• How to run in an emulator
• When errors occur
• How to debug
• print() statement
• Flutter inspector or DartCode VS Code plugin
• Watch mode

Section: Foundational Flutter

3.     Everything is widgets

• Chapter Synopsis: Widgets are super-important to Flutter since they're the building blocks of every Flutter app. We show why and provide the motivation and basic tools to create widgets.
Reminder about widgets
• Composition
• Define composition
• Provide real-world examples
• Why it is such a win
• Comparison with Web Components, React, Angular, and Vue
• The categories of Flutter UI widgets
For each category, we'll explain why we'd use them, what they have in common, and give one or two examples of the most fundamental and needed widgets in each category.
• Value Widgets
• Example: Text widget
• Style Widgets
• Example: Center widget
• Composition Widgets
• Example: Container widget
• Navigation Widgets
• Example: AppBar widget

• What is state?
• How to create a custom stateless widget (Note: creating a stateful widget is complex so we're saving it for the State chapter).

4.     Value Widgets

• Chapter Synopsis: Deep dive into widgets that hold a value, especially user-input fields
• What's the pubspec.yaml file?
• Text widget
• ListView widget
• ListView for a small list
• ListTitle
• Using a ListView.builder() for memory efficiency
• Image widget
• Input widgets
• TextField widget
• Form widget
• TextFormField widget (Yes, it's different)
• CheckBox widget
• RadioButton widget
• DropDownButton and DropDownMenuItem widgets
• Validating input data

5.     Responding to Gestures

• Chapter Synopsis: How to make your program do things in response to user actions like taps, swiping, pinching, and the like
The button family
• RaisedButton widget
• FlatButton widget
• IconButton widget
• FloatingActionButton widget
• CupertinoButton
• Custom gestures on custom widgets
• Step 1 - Decide on your gestures
Step 2 - Create your custom widget
• Step 3 - Add a GestureDetector widget
• Step 4 - Associate your gesture with a method
• Example - LongPress
• Example - Pinching
• Example - Swiping
• Competing gestures
The GestureArena and conflict resolution

6.     Laying out your widgets

• Chapter Synopsis: How to lay out a view, controlling how widgets are placed side-by-side and/or above-and-below, defining the amount of space between widgets, and aligning them vertically and horizontally
• How sizing widgets works
• Box constraints
• Box size vs widget size
• What's the difference and when each apply
• Width, height, minwidth, maxwidth, minheight, maxheight
Layout properties that apply to most widgets
• Margin
• Border
• Padding
• EdgeInsets.all(), EdgeInsets.only()
• Position
• Alignment
• How to apply these things to widgets that don't support them
• Laying out the whole scene
• MaterialApp and Scaffold widgets
• AppBar widget
• SnackBar widget
• SnackBarAction
• Widgets that hold multiple children
• Row and Column widgets
• Aligning inside them
• ScrollView widgets
• To make view scrollable
• Expanded widget
• For when the contents are larger than the screen
• GridView widget
• For children across and then down. Like Pinterest
• Stack widget
• For allowing widgets to overlay each other in the z-direction
• Widgets that hold a single child
• Container widget
• Expanded widget
Center widget
• SafeArea widget
• Card widget

7.     Navigation with widgets

• Chapter Synopsis: Making the app "hide" one widget and "show" another in response to user actions. This makes them feel like they're moving from one view to another.
• Dialog widget
• AlertDialog widget and showDialog method
• Why navigation?
• Why do we need routes?
• Named routes
• The Navigator widget
• Pushing and popping routes
• Setting up navigation
• MaterialPageRoute
• Types of navigation
• Tab navigation
• Stack navigation
• Dialogs and modals
• Passing context between routes
• Drawer widget
• Tab widget
• Stack widget
• Hamburger icon and dropdown navigation
• BottomSheet widget
• BottomNavigation widget

8.     Styling your widgets

• Chapter Synopsis: How to control each widget's position, color, spacing, and other presentational characteristics. We handled light styling as we introduced each widget above but this is where we answer all the questions needed to get a real-world app looking good.
• This is not CSS
• Styles don't get inherited
• What is Material Design?
• Some widgets take a style parameter.
• Text
• TextStyle
letterSpacing, fontWeight, color
• textScaleFactor, fontSize
• textOverflow, maxlines
• Underline, overline, strikethrough
• Using custom fonts
• Google Fonts
• pubspec.yaml
• Selecting, downloading, applying
• BoxDecoration
• BorderRadius Widget
• BoxShadow Widget
• BoxShape enum (.circle, etc)
• Themes
• Applying a theme to the entire app
• Applying styles from the current theme

9.     Maintaining State

• Chapter Synopsis: How to get data from one widget to another and how to change that data.
• Reminder of stateful vs. stateless widgets
• When to choose each
• How to create a custom stateful widget
• Extend StatefulWidget with createState()
• Extend State with build()
• Call setState() to trigger a re-render
• Passing data from host to inner
• Passing data from inner to host
• Sharing data between siblings and cousins

Section: Above and Beyond 

10.  Talking to other computers

• Chapter Synopsis: How to read from and write to a server. This is where we show how to make Ajax calls.
• Why would we want to talk to a server?
• RESTful APIs are amazing!
• Definition of REST
• Structure of REST
Get a feel for the API we'll be using in the Firebase appendix
• How to read a single record
• How to read a list of records
• How to add a new record
• How to delete an existing record
• How to update an existing record

• Chapter Synopsis: How to find, install, and use 3^rd-party components and libraries in your Flutter app
• Locating libraries
• Installing libraries
• Integrating in your Flutter app

12.  Using the camera and other device resources

• Chapter Synopsis: How Flutter allows us to programmatically use the phone's native hardware
• Taking pictures and video with the camera
• Making phone calls
• Sending SMS/text messages
• Using the GPS and geolocation to know where you are
• Reading sensors -- thermometer, brightness, proximity, air pressure, accelerometer and gyroscope
• Battery Power monitor

Section: Appendices

Dart language intro

• Chapter Synopsis: A brief introduction to the Dart language. More of a cheat sheet
• Flutter procedural code is written in Dart
• Why did Google choose Dart?
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Dart
• Sort of a compromise between JavaScript and Java
• Statically-typed like Java
• Truly object-oriented like Java
• Dart vs. JavaScript
• Dart vs. Java/C#
• Features of Dart we need for Flutter

Firebase

• Chapter Synopsis: Firebase is the Google service we'll be using to host our RESTful data. This appendix is a high-level explanation, just enough for the reader to understand the server-side tools. Demystifying the backend enough so the reader isn't distracted. Answers the question, "What parts are done in Flutter and what parts are done by something else?"
• Firebase functions
• Firebase Firestore 
Firebase authentication