Quick Start Guide to Dart Programming : Create High-Performance Applications for the Web and Mobile

Get started with Dart and learn to program with this language suitable for high-performing, modern applications. You'll gain the basics and be ready to move to the next level: web and mobile apps. While you won't learn the specifics of programming web and mobile apps, you will have the foundation to take your Dart skills in that direction. This book starts with an introduction to the Dart IDE, after which you will take a look at the various components of the Dart programming language. You will look at types and variables, and get to know the significance of collections and arrays in Dart. Once you've familiarized yourself with the initial components of Dart, you will see how flow of control and looping can be achieved by using if, else, and conditional expressions. Moving on to functions and objects, you will dig deeper into the concepts of object oriented programming to gauge the importance of constructors in Dart. You will then discover more about inheritance and mixins, seeing how they contain methods for use by other classes. After gauging the importance of abstract classes and methods, you will learn more about anonymous functions such as lambdas and closures. You will then take a look at key data structures including lists and maps to aid you in organizing your information for storage and retrieval. After all this you’ll move on to managing exceptions arising from executing your program. Finally, Dart programming relies heavily on libraries to perform a variety of functions. You will cover some of these packages and libraries, including dart:core and dart:math, and also build a backend server with the help of the Dart core libraries. **What You Will Learn*** Use variables and conditionals in Dart * Work with arrays and collections * Apply flow control and looping * Explore data structures and their use * Handle exceptions * Use Dart packages and libraries to build a backend server **Who This Book Is For**Those new to Dart programming who aim to get a quick introduction to its concepts and programming principles. Readers with no coding experience can also take advantage of this book. Table of Contents 5 About the Author 9 About the Technical Reviewer 10 Acknowledgments 11 Introduction 12 Chapter 1: Getting Started with Dart 13 The Core Features of Dart 14 Using an IDE for Dart 16 Installing IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition 19 Installing Android Studio 21 Writing Some Dart Code 23 Variables, Operators, Conditionals, and Control Flow 26 Variables Store References 26 Built-in Types in Dart 29 Suppose You Don’t Like Variables 30 Playing with Number and Double 31 Understanding Strings 34 To Be True or to Be False 38 Introduction to Collections: Arrays Are Lists in Dart 39 Get, Set, Go 41 Operators Are Useful 45 Relational Operators 47 Type Test Operators 50 Assignment Operators 51 Summary 53 Chapter 2: Flow Control and Looping 54 if-else 54 Conditional Expressions 60 Looking at Looping 61 for Loop 61 while and do-while 64 Patterns in Looping 67 for Loop Labels 71 Continue with the for Loop 73 Decision-Making with switch and case 74 Summary 76 Chapter 3: Functions and Objects 77 Functions 77 Objects 83 Digging Deep into Object-Oriented Programming 87 Examining Constructors 91 How to Implement Classes 94 Lexical Scope in Functions 97 A Few Words About Getter and Setter 99 Different Types of Parameters 100 More About Constructors 103 Chapter 4: Inheritance and Mixins in Dart 106 A First Look at Inheritance 107 Multilevel Inheritance 113 Mixins: Adding More Features to a Class 117 Chapter 5: Entity Relationships: Abstract Classes, Interfaces, and Exception Handling 121 Identifying Relationships Between Entities 122 Using Abstract Classes 125 Advantages of Interfaces 129 Static Variables and Methods 138 Exception Handling 140 Chapter 6: Anonymous Functions 149 A First Look at Lambdas 150 Exploring Higher-Order Functions 153 A Closure Is a Special Function 154 Bringing It All Together 157 Chapter 7: Data Structures and Collections 161 Lists: An Ordered Collection 163 Set: An Unordered Collections of Unique Items 170 Maps: The Key-Value Pair 174 Using Collections Together 179 Queue Is Open-Ended 184 Chapter 8: Multithreaded Programming Using Future and Callable Classes 186 Callable Classes 186 Future, Async, Await, and Asynchronous Programming 189 More on the Future API 204 Chapter 9: Dart Packages and Libraries 208 Importing Packages 210 Using Built-in Dart Libraries 213 Writing a Server Using Dart 213 Showing Some Simple Text 214 Showing an HTML Page 218 What’s Next 221 Index 222 Get started with Dart and learn to program with this language suitable for high-performing, modern applications. You'll gain the basics and be ready to move to the next level: web and mobile apps. While you won't learn the specifics of programming web and mobile apps, you will have the foundation to take your Dart skills in that direction. This book starts with an introduction to the Dart IDE, after which you will take a look at the various components of the Dart programming language. You will look at types and variables, and get to know the significance of collections and arrays in Dart. Once you've familiarized yourself with the initial components of Dart, you will see how flow of control and looping can be achieved by using if, else, and conditional expressions. Moving on to functions and objects, you will dig deeper into the concepts of object oriented programming to gauge the importance of constructors in Dart. You will then discover more about inheritance and mixins, seeing how they contain methods for use by other classes. After gauging the importance of abstract classes and methods, you will learn more about anonymous functions such as lambdas and closures. You will then take a look at key data structures including lists and maps to aid you in organizing your information for storage and retrieval. After all this you’ll move on to managing exceptions arising from executing your program. Finally, Dart programming relies heavily on libraries to perform a variety of functions. You will cover some of these packages and libraries, including dart:core and dart:math, and also build a backend server with the help of the Dart core libraries. What You Will Learn Use variables and conditionals in Dart Work with arrays and collections Apply flow control and looping Explore data structures and their use Handle exceptions Use Dart packages and libraries to build a backend server Who This Book Is For Those new to Dart programming who aim to get a quick introduction to its concepts and programming principles. Readers with no coding experience can also take advantage of this book. Get started with Dart and learn to program with this language suitable for high-performing, modern applications. You'll gain the basics and be ready to move to the next level: web and mobile apps. While you won't learn the specifics of programming web and mobile apps, you will have the foundation to take your Dart skills in that direction. This book starts with an introduction to the Dart IDE, after which you will take a look at the various components of the Dart programming language. You will look at types and variables, and get to know the significance of collections and arrays in Dart. Once you've familiarized yourself with the initial components of Dart, you will see how flow of control and looping can be achieved by using if, else, and conditional expressions. Moving on to functions and objects, you will dig deeper into the concepts of object oriented programming to gauge the importance of constructors in Dart. You will then discover more about inheritance and mixins, seeing how they contain methods for use by other classes. After gauging the importance of abstract classes and methods, you will learn more about anonymous functions such as lambdas and closures. You will then take a look at key data structures including lists and maps to aid you in organizing your information for storage and retrieval. After all this you'll move on to managing exceptions arising from executing your program. Finally, Dart programming relies heavily on libraries to perform a variety of functions. You will cover some of these packages and libraries, including dart: core and dart: math, and also build a backend server with the help of the Dart core libraries. What You Will Learn Use variables and conditionals in Dart Work with arrays and collections Apply flow control and looping Explore data structures and their use Handle exceptions Use Dart packages and libraries to build a backend server Who This Book Is For Those new to Dart programming who aim to get a quick introduction to its concepts and programming principles. Readers with no coding experience can also take advantage of this book. Front Matter ....Pages i-xv Getting Started with Dart (Sanjib Sinha)....Pages 1-41 Flow Control and Looping (Sanjib Sinha)....Pages 43-65 Functions and Objects (Sanjib Sinha)....Pages 67-95 Inheritance and Mixins in Dart (Sanjib Sinha)....Pages 97-111 Entity Relationships: Abstract Classes, Interfaces, and Exception Handling (Sanjib Sinha)....Pages 113-140 Anonymous Functions (Sanjib Sinha)....Pages 141-152 Data Structures and Collections (Sanjib Sinha)....Pages 153-177 Multithreaded Programming Using Future and Callable Classes (Sanjib Sinha)....Pages 179-200 Dart Packages and Libraries (Sanjib Sinha)....Pages 201-214 Back Matter ....Pages 215-218 If you want to learn how to build native iOS and Android mobile apps and web apps using Dart, this book serves as a good introduction because it is designed to give you a complete picture of how Dart works. -- Edited summary from book