Announcing our Newest Book: Dart Apprentice!

If you’ve been keeping tabs on the growth of Flutter, Google’s cross-platform UI toolkit for apps, you’ll have heard about the language underneath: Dart.

Designed for rapid UI development with features such as hot reload, and an ability to compile to native machine code (or even compile to JavaScript!), Dart is poised to have a major impact on how we build mobile apps today and in the future.

That’s why we’re excited to announce our newest book that teaches you everything you need to know to start building apps with the Dart programming language: Dart Apprentice!

Dart Apprentice will help you master the Dart programming language though guided, hands-on exercises and challenges throughout the book. If you’re coming from Swift, Kotlin, or other modern language, you’ll feel right at home and be writing Dart in no time!

Keep reading to learn more about the Dart Apprentice, and how you can get started reading for free today!

What Is Dart?

Dart is a modern and rapidly evolving language from Google that allows you to do things with your code that are both exciting and even historic in nature.

When combined with Flutter, Dart lets you build native iOS and Android apps with a single code base, which is something that mobile developers have been waiting for for years — it’s no wonder that developers across the world have taken notice!

The Dart virtual machine allows lightning fast development-time rebuilds. Its JavaScript compiler allows you to build for the web, and its ahead-of-time compiler creates fast native applications across mobile and desktop platforms.

If you are new to programming, Dart is a great way to jump right in and learn development with a modern language, However, it’s also a powerful tool for advanced developers too.

About Dart Apprentice

The Dart Apprentice book will teach you all the basic concepts you need to master Dart and feel comfortable writing your own Dart programs.

Inside, you’ll find:

The concepts that you’ll learn in the Dart Apprentice will give you a solid foundation in your coding career. For example, you’ll learn about fundamentals like functions, one of the concepts you’ll use more extensively in Dart and many other languages!

• Chapter 1: Hello, Dart!: Set up your development environment to work with Dart and create your first Dart projects. Follow along to install the necessary tools and Dart’s SDK. Get to know the structure of a Dart project and why Pub and Stagehand will become useful tools when programming with Dart.
• Chapter 2: Expressions, Variables & Constants: What’s the difference between a variable and a constant? How do you write comments? And what mathematical expressions can you use? This chapter will answer these questions and allow you to get started with the basic principles you need to become a master of Dart!
• Chapter 3: Types & Operations: Learn some of the main types provided by Dart and the different operations you can perform with them. Dig deeper into strings and the way Dart represents text and characters using Unicode. You’ll also convert between types, what type inference, concatenation or interpolation are used for and finally, what is the difference between dynamically and statically typed languages.
• Chapter 4: Control Flow: In this chapter, you’ll start to learn more advanced topics. As the name implies, Control flow will allow you to determine and decide what your program does at each step. Booleans, enums, switches, if-else statements and loops will allow you to set the path your program will follow.

• Chapter 5: Functions: Functions are one of the most-used concepts when programming in Dart and many other languages. See how powerful and flexible Dart functions are and learn about closures and the difference between anonymous or arrow functions.
• Chapter 6: Classes: Dig deeper into Dart itself by learning about Dart classes and other key elements such as access control for variables and methods, static members, cascade notation and more.
• Chapter 7: Nullability: Gain an overview of null before diving deeper into null-aware operators, null safety and more.
• Chapter 8: Collections: Learn the various collection elements such as lists, maps, sets, higher-order functions, collection operators and more.
• Chapter 9: Advanced Classes: Build on what you learned in Chapter 6, “Classes,” by learning extending classes, abstract classes and inheritance, mixins, extension methods and more.
• Chapter 10: Asynchronous Programming: Learn concurrency in Dart, as well as other features such as futures, streams, isolates and more. You’ll be challenged with a mock network call to practice what you’ve learned.

The Dart Apprentice is part of our Early Access program; Chapters 1-5 are available now, and the remaining chapters (6-10) should be out by November 2020!

After finishing the Dart Apprentice, you’ll be prepared for the future of cross-platform development, from iOS to Android to the web and beyond.

Start Reading Dart Apprentice for Free

Hey — did you know that all of our books include free sample chapters, even if you aren’t a subscriber to our site?

We’ve made the following chapters of Dart Apprentice available for free so that you can get a preview of the book:

• [Free!] Chapter 1: Hello, Dart! Set up your development environment to work with Dart, and create your first Dart projects. Follow along to install the necessary tools and Dart’s SDK. Get to know the structure of a Dart project and why Pub and Stagehand will become useful tools when programming with Dart.
• [Free!] Chapter 2: Expressions, Variables & Constants: What’s the difference between a variable and a constant? How do you write comments? And what mathematical expressions can you use? This chapter will answer these questions and allow you to get started with the basic principles you need to become a master of Dart!

You can get started reading the Early Access version of Dart Apprentice at the link below:

• raywenderlich.com/books/dart-apprentice

Meet the Authors

Of course, the Dart Apprentice would be nothing without the efforts of our team of authors on this book:

Jonathan Sande is the author of this book. He doesn’t like wasting time rebuilding the same app on multiple platforms and in different languages, so that’s why he uses Dart for mobile apps, Dart for desktop apps, Dart for the web and Dart on the server. You’d have a hard time convincing him to ever go back. Online he usually goes by the name Suragch, which is a Mongolian word meaning “student”, a reminder to never stop learning.

Matt Galloway is an author of Swift Apprentice, which served as the basis for the first few chapters of this book. He’s the founder of SwipeStack, a mobile development company based in London, UK which creates apps for clients and also a few of their own. One client’s app was featured by Apple in the best apps of 2011, the App Rewind in the newsstand category. BeerMap is one of their own creations, helping beer drinkers find a great pub near them! You can find him on Twitter here.