Flutter in action – Eric Windmill

Written by Eric Windmill. As the name describes, this book is about Google’s open source hybrid framework which can be used to develop mobile applications for the android and iOS platforms. If you are a back end/front end/full stack developer, interested in mobile app development this will be one of the good choices to start with. The app can be developed in record time. If you are familiar with this framework, you can develop a complete app within a month.

Flutter is already taking the space of hybrid mobile app development domain. One of the main reasons is unlike other frameworks like Ionic, React Native, etc., flutter doesn’t use custom bridge between the framework and mobile OS. It compiles and builds the code into native byte codes, which runs comparatively faster than those apps. Another reason is with almost no need to write platform specific codes for iOS/android. Currently, the framework team is working on to make the same code to work as web application as well. So, single code base multiple platforms is the agenda.

Even though, React Native has well-established support and online community, I hope sooner or later flutter will take the space. Already the flutter user base is growing rapidly.

As it is open source, already there are so many flutter packages available which can be used for most of the current day scenarios. There will nearly zero need we have to write code from beginning for several tasks. Mostly we have to wire the packages to meet our requirements.

As this book is released under manning series, the standard of this book is great as usual. Whenever I want to read a book on any particular technology, I will do search first under manning is there any book for it. If there is, no further search I do. I pick it. This is due to the way the book is designed, the content organized and the way of briefing. This book is no exception.

If asked, I can give one feedback on this book. Usually, most of the manning books will use the same example from beginning to end to describe the concepts, which means they will develop an app from the beginning till the end. On every chapter the app will be introduced with new features based on the concepts briefed there. But this book is not designed that way. The examples are getting started newly for every few chapters. This gives a bit of discontinuation as a learner. It would have been great if we have used the same app as example, so that we can easily connect with.

In overall, to learn the flutter framework, this book is the one stop solution as on today. But we have to remember Flutter is not just this book alone. This book gives the basic idea and road map to learn and explore further.