Hey what’s up everyone, this is Brian and welcome to the second part of Your First Flutter App - Polishing the App. This part two of the course is meant to give you a nice overview of Flutter development. In the last course, we focused on creating an app from scratch. The app is a simple where users guess the number by moving a slider to the correct position.
When we last left off, our app was somewhat complete, but it wasn’t much of an app, you’d write home about.
In this course, we’ll add the missing pieces as well as providing the much needed polish, converting the app into something that looks and plays well.
Needless to say, if you are new Flutter and you haven’t taken the preview course - that is “Your First Flutter App: An App from Scratch”, then stop watching this video now, and spend some moments finishing that course. Don’t worry, we’ll wait here.
Otherwise, buckle up because we have lots to do. This course is composed of four different parts that will focus on a specific part of Flutter development.
In this part, we’re going to be doing some exploration of the Dart programming language.
In this part, you’ll learn about the Dart Core Libraries.
Then, you’ll be introduced to methods. Once you have methods down,
we’ll do some exploration of the if statement.
Then we’ll play around with some custom number methods.
You’ll also gain an understanding of type inferences.
Finally, we’ll wrap up this part with a discussion of variable scope.
As you can see, this isn’t a comprehensive overview of Dart. Rather, it’s just enough to get you through this course. In the next course, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the language itself.
This course is designed to be hands-on, where we’ll build the app together step-by-step. It’s very important that you don’t just watch the exercises, but actually follow along. Open up Visual Studio Code, type along with me, and run the app we build in the either the iOS Simulator or an Android emulator. This helps you understand how the app gets built step by step.
In addition, the course contains several hands-on challenges, where you’ll get to practice what you’ve just learned on your own. It’s in your best interest to actually pause the video and try solving the challenges - you’ll learn a ton by doing this. There is a big difference between knowing the path and walking the path… And the only way to learn programming is to actually do it.
Now in the previous course, we used a to-do list to break down our tasks for building the app. This course is no different. You’ll see our very task is to create a random number, so let’s take a crack at this by using one of Dart’s core libraries. We’ll do this in the next episode.