The International Flutter Starter Kit (Part 1/3)
Whether you are a beginner in programming or a Flutter evangelist this guide is for you 😉
*** This article is written in collaboration with Beyza Sunay Güler ***
What’s the idea behind this article?
If you are new to Flutter or you are about to edit your first study jam, this article is for you! The idea of not knowing what to do when you are new in Flutter, or not being sure what is good when looking for resources from scratch then we think we can ask experts around the world for advice.
This way you can listen to resource recommendations about Flutter from experts.
The anatomy of this article goes as follows:-
1. What is Flutter?
2. Flutter Resources for Beginners (Flutter & Dart GDE Edition)
Enough waiting, let’s dive into this!
1. Wait a second, what is Flutter?
Flutter is Google’s portable UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively-compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase in a record time.
Flutter works with existing code and thus is used by developers, designers, and organizations around the world! The best part is that Flutter is free and open source.
Before we start, if you don’t know about Flutter you can look check here.
Okay, now we know what Flutter is. But we can hear you saying: “Okay, this is cool but how & where shall I start this learning journey? And how can we advance in Flutter? 🤔” If you have questions like these, don’t worry we got you today Flutter expert’s opinions that can guide you through this :)
2. Flutter Resources from our Flutter & Dart Google Developers Experts (GDEs)👩🏼💻👨🏼💻
We were lucky enough to interview the GDEs whom we were able to reach out regarding what are their opinions on where the beginner should land on. The names are presented in an A-Z fashion.
Ahmed Abu Eldahab
Alexandria, Egypt
Q1: How did you start with Flutter as a beginner back in the time? 🤓
I started with Flutter in 2017 and I fell in love with Flutter from the first sight to read the whole story check this link.
Q2: What do you love the most about Flutter?
The team behind it, they did an amazing job writing a framework that makes you love what you are doing and gives you the confidence that you can do anything with it.
Q3: What do you say to all the beginners in Flutter?
Keep it simple, don’t try to apply any previous judgment or experience in mobile development on Flutter, even Flutter inspiration came from other technologies but it has its own spirit. If you don’t know anything about programming starts with Dart then move to Flutter. If you are a web developer or have any previous knowledge with programming Dart will be very easy to you and you can start directly with Flutter, and don’t fight the framework applying some external tools that used on other technologies especially when you reach state management section. Flutter has native support for most cases you need.
Q4: What are some resources that you recommend for those who are just starting out with Flutter? & are there good Flutter resources in your language?
- The first resource for sure is the official Flutter channel and you can know the most important Flutter widgets by listening to the “Flutter Widget of the Week” series from here.
- Then “Flutter in Focus” will help you to get a deep understanding of how Flutter works.
- If you don’t know anything about Dart you can start here.
Yes, I recorded 2 Flutter StudyJams on my YouTube channel here.
- Part 1 we covered most of the questions you have in mind about mobile development in general then we introduced Flutter with two Flutter codelabs.
- Part 2 we moved to the next level covering ( Flutter Render Object — Directory structures — Theming — Routing — Asynchronous requests — Dart Isolates — Data Models — Flutter best practices- FutureBuilder Widget — ListView & GridView )
- If you need full courses you can check these links also:
- Raouf Rahiche
- Ahmed Mohamady
- Muhammed Essa → sectionA, sectionB, and sectionC.
Andrea Bizzotto
London, UK
Q1: How did you start with Flutter as a beginner back in the time? 🤓
By chance. I was doing some contract work, and I ended up on a new project using Flutter. I really liked it from the start, and I decided to share my learnings with videos and articles.
Q2: What do you love the most about Flutter?
The developer experience is great. Besides the hot reload, the documentation is excellent and always one tap away. Both the Flutter team and the community are very active and publish great tutorials regularly.
Q3: What do you say to all the beginners in Flutter?
Try it out for yourself by building something simple, and learn what you need as you go along. Sometimes you may get stuck. Read/watch some tutorials. Apply what you learn to your projects. Rinse & repeat. Of course, all of this takes time. And you may wonder if you should invest your time learning Flutter in the first place. Regardless of what frameworks will be most popular in the future, there is a clear trend towards declarative programming in modern app development (React Native, Flutter, and SwiftUI most recently). You will get valuable skills by learning any of these. But in my opinion, getting the multi-platform experience right is what really sets Flutter apart, and makes it worth learning.
Q4: What are some resources that you recommend for those who are just starting out with Flutter? & are there good Flutter resources in your language?
There are so many! I really like the Flutter in Focus & Widget of the Week YouTube series from the Flutter team. Filled Stacks and Fireship have also published some great material recently. But there are many more good ones. I recommend Awesome Flutter on GitHub for an updated list.
Burhanuddin Rashid
India
Q1: How did you start with Flutter as a beginner back in the time? 🤓
Initially, I was looking for a good cross-platform solution and at that time I came across react native. To be honest It took me 3–4 hours to set up all the things for React native. Then I saw a Flutter talk in GDG Devfest in Ahmedabad 2 years ago. So I started with official docs and it just took me 30–45 min to set up and run the sample app. That catches my attention and that’s how it all started.
Q2: What do you love the most about Flutter?
Since I am from Android Background. I love the hot reload feature and all material spect in-build widgets.
Q3: What do you say to all the beginners in Flutter?
First, learn the basics of flutter with examples and after that try to build a real-world application that will help us to understand how flutter works in the real world. I always recommend building a TODO app which contains basic CRUD operation with network request. And the last thing before trying to build any Custom Widget, just go through the widget catalog once. Flutter has 130+ widgets. Chances are that you might find already one on the list.
Q4: What are some resources that you recommend for those who are just starting out with Flutter? & are there good Flutter resources in your language?
The official website. They have great documentation and very nice examples to begin with. If anyone is not a fan of reading and then definitely check out the MTechViral videos on YouTube. This channel also has videos in our native language which is Hindi.
Also, I recommend following Flutter Community on Twitter. To checkout an open list of apps built with Flutter over here.
Dhrumil Shah
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
Q1: How did you start with Flutter as a beginner back in the time? 🤓
I came to know about Flutter from DevFest Ahmedabad 2017 by Parth Jansari. And I started exploring Flutter from codelabs, documentation, and YouTube videos.
Q2: What do you love the most about Flutter?
I love many things. Let me go one by one. First the community and the support from it. Second the documentation. Third the Hot Reload. Fourth the development time which is very less. Fifth everything which is necessary is just available out of the box, no need to integrate any third-party library. Still many more reason to love Flutter. Have I missed the Dash??
Q3: What do you say to all the beginners in Flutter?
One thing I always share with the one who wants to start with Flutter is, understand the concept before jumping to the code. Learn how Flutter work, know at least one native mobile development framework that will help to understand Flutter easily. Moreover, keep the documentation handy and have a habit of reading it. Most of the problems will get resolved from it.
Q4: What are some resources that you recommend for those who are just starting out with Flutter? & are there good Flutter resources in your language?
There are plenty of resources now available on the net. Some are free, some are paid. One can start with documentation, Google codelabs, free Udacity, and Udemy courses. Youtube channels from different GDEs like MTechViral from Pawan Kumar. You can follow Flutter_Flakes which I manage to get all the latest resource update ;)
For the paid courses I will recommend a course from the Appbrewery which is really very good for the beginners.
Diego Velásquez
Lima, Peru
Q1: How did you start with Flutter as a beginner back in the time?
I currently work as an architect of mobile solutions in the Startup called Aeyrium.We were developing the app on iOS for a year, before finalizing, we realized that we can make use of some cross-platform framework so as not to have to write the app 2 times (Android and iOS). That’s where the CEO of the company was evaluating options, one of them was React Native, but because we read enough information that some companies were returning from that framework to native apps, then we decided to look for another one, I started researching and found Flutter, I did a simple concept test and we fell in love with the framework, the learning curve was short, and we found what we were looking for.
Q2: What do you love the most about Flutter?
I like a lot of things:
- The development tools it provides.
- Hot Reload is fantastic, it speeds up the development process and allows you to test your changes in real-time, no more downtime by recompiling the entire application.
- That everything is a widget and that the way we design our apps based on their composition is very simple.
- The Flutter community is big and always willing to support everything.
- The members of the Google Flutter team, I had the opportunity to meet them personally in the Google I/O 2019 and they are all great.
Q3: What do you say to all the beginners in Flutter?
I always hear the question about whether they should learn Flutter or Kotlin or some other language. And I always tell you, learn everything you can, if you are thinking of developing a multiplatform app, Flutter is the best option.
If you already know any programming language, the learning curve of Dart is short. And the most important thing is to share knowledge when you teach, you learn much more.
Q4: What are some resources that you recommend for those who are just starting out with Flutter? & are there good Flutter resources in your language?
The first thing is to read the official documentation, there is a lot of information and many links to interesting blogs. Also, follow the official YouTube Flutter channel and my friend Pawan Kumar’s channel (MtechViral), he always uploads very interesting videos about Dart and Flutter.
And of course the Flutter community blog.
You can follow me on my networks😊
github.com/diegoveloper/
twitter.com/diegoveloper
medium.com/@diegoveloper/
Evgeny Kot
St. Petersburg, Russia
Q1: How did you start with Flutter as a beginner back in the time?
I work with Dart for the last 5 years, my company (Wrike) is one of the early adopters of this language. I believe right now we have one of the biggest apps which use Dart in production (on frontend). So I started to work with Flutter before it was announced. And of course, as with any product at this stage, it was very difficult to work with. But I was astonished how fast the team jumped from very raw alpha to stable version.
Q2: What do you love the most about Flutter?
What I like most about Flutter — is that it gives me the ability to create an application on many platforms, with one single codebase and tools. Previously I have to write 4–5 applications for every platform, use dozens of tools, every platform have own debugging, packaging, etc. But right now I can create a product for every user on the planet in 5 minutes. It doesn’t matter if the user prefers mobile, web or desktop — my app will work almost everywhere.
Q3: What do you say to all the beginners in Flutter?
Best way to know Flutter is to implement something. Just imagine, what application you miss most on your phone? Or what functionality you always wanted to be on the desktop. Imagine and create it with the help of Flutter!
Q4: What are some resources that you recommend for those who are just starting out with Flutter? & are there good Flutter resources in your language?
I would recommend visiting the official site, the team did an awesome job with both the docs and the examples! Also, there is cool repo with a lot of useful links. For Russian-speaking developers I suggest joining our community in Telegram.
Faisal Abid
Canada, Canada
Q1: How did you start with Flutter as a beginner back in the time? 🤓
I was at Dart Summit when “Sky” was announced by Eric Sidel, and that evening I went home and downloaded the prototype Sky SDK and played around with it.
Q2: What do you love the most about Flutter?
I love how fast it is to prototype and distribute applications. As a startup founder, it gives me the highest ROI to develop and distribute something in Flutter very quickly
Q3: What do you say to all the beginners in Flutter?
What I say to all the beginners of any framework/language: “Spend one full weekend on it, you’ll be able to learn the basics of anything and be able to make the decision if you want to learn it more or not!”
Q4: What are some resources that you recommend for those who are just starting out with Flutter? & are there good Flutter resources in your language?
I think the Flutter docs are great. Flutter docs have sections for people coming from iOS, Android, React or Web Dev, use these as a short cut to jumpstart your learning.
Our world tour is not over yet! See you at Part (2/4) 🔥🤩
About the writers
Beyza Sunay Güler is an archaeologist and a software developer. She loves making translations about Flutter and publishing them on Flutter Turkey. She’s a co-organizer at GDG&WTM-Ankara:)) You can find her on Linkedin and Twitter. Feel free to contact her!
Nawal Alhamwi is an SDG advocate and a software wizard. Flutter to her is love at first sight! She is a co-organizer at GDG Jeddah and a leader at WTM Jeddah. LinkedIn & Twitter are her favorable virtual places and thus you can find her hanging out there!
Until then, happy Flutter-ing & stay hydrated 🥤💙
