Resources for learning Dart / Flutter

July 27, 2022

The basis of any learning is books. Same with new coding languages and frameworks, it’s healthy to have something solid to refer back to. It doesn’t need to be a physical book (although it is preferable), we quite enjoy reading eBook format – particularly on the Apple Books app (both on the computer and on phone). It can be a good replacement to endless scrolling of social feeds.

It’s important to have a solid book to come back to. All the same information is available from other resources online, but reading a book seems to stick better with us. I guess mostly because we spend a significant time with a book to read it through.

Book: Dart Apprentice

We love this book for its simplicity and practicality. It explains the basics of Dart programming language, while also keeping in mind Flutter, quite thoroughly. It’s not too long or complex. Definitely a good read from front to back, I was surprised it was over so quickly.

We like to return to this book often, just to refresh the basics and do exercises on topics we need to familiarise more.

Highlights (elaborate):

Types
Nullability
Collections (collection if, collection…)
Advanced classes
Asynchronous Programming

This book is available from… (link) It costs…

Official resources

(elaborate on each)

Dart language documentation

https://dart.dev/guides

Especially:

Dart language tour (reference): https://dart.dev/guides/language/language-tour

Dart codelabs: https://dart.dev/codelabs

Dart style guide: https://dart.dev/guides/language/effective-dart

Flutter documentation: https://docs.flutter.dev/

Especially:

Cookbook: https://docs.flutter.dev/cookbook

Codelabs: https://docs.flutter.dev/codelabs

Widget catalog: https://docs.flutter.dev/development/ui/widgets

Flutter foundations video course

https://codewithandrea.com/courses/complete-flutter-bundle

This is a paid video course by Andrea Bizzotto. It’s an excellent resource for learning how to build quality maintainable applications for production. It extensively covers app architecture and automated testing, which are critical to getting your code right.

The course uses GoRouter, Riverpod and RxDart as packages of choice. And the author gives persuasive arguments for using these.

The course centers around the Commerce app, which is being built as a Flutter web app. It’s quicker to develop it as a web app (important in video format), and since Flutter is cross-platform the resulting app is the same for other platforms.

Andrea is very pedantic and methodical, he manages to compress a lot of value in a short amount of time. The course is well worth 109$ for the complete package. It requires basic knowledge of Flutter to follow this course though.

The support materials included in this course, and others on his website are also outstanding. He’s been developing with Flutter and creating content for several years and shares everything along the way.

Even experienced developers give feedback that they learn something from him even after multiple years of Flutter development experience.

As you see in the next sections, you get a lot of Andreas content for free too.

Web resources (by Andrea)

Topics:

Flutter and Firebase introduction

Layouts

State management

Animations

Testing

And a lot more…

Best way to review them chronologically (from older to newer). But pay most attention to the latest content, because Andrea himself has graduated over time to the best solutions.

Some of his content is related to his other courses on Dart language and Flutter animations.

Git repositories (by Andrea)

Flutter example apps

https://github.com/bizz84/flutter_example_apps

Tips and tricks:

https://github.com/bizz84/flutter-tips-and-tricks

Complete Flutter course:

https://github.com/bizz84/complete-flutter-course

Animations Gallery

https://github.com/bizz84/flutter_animations_gallery

(Link to supporting article)

Started architecture