Flutter in Action Chapter 3 "Breaking into Flutter".

Completed taking notes on "Flutter in Action" chapter 3 "Breaking into Flutter".

https://www.manning.com/books/flutter-in-action

Flutter is big; the minimum set of knowledge required to play along is very large so an intro that tosses you into Flutter is going to cover a lot of topics at levels from very high to very low that all have to be mastered, or at least somewhat understood, simultaneously.

To give a historical comparison, the entire K+R C language book that I learned C from in the 80s is smaller than this introduction chapter, and it followed a linear education path rather than requiring everything to be understood at once simultaneously.

So in one sense this chapter is scattered because one page is discussing the project design philosophy of preferring OO composition over OO inheritance, and the next is a deep dive into the concept of the widget tree and the next is a discussion of stateful vs stateless widgets and the next is an "in the weeds" detail about how to embed images into your apps in the pubspec.yaml file, then back to the theory of how the widget tree works with the element tree.  And much much more.

There are some rough spots not covered in the book but easy enough to figure out.  Flutter seems to be a language that's unwritable without an advanced IDE like Android Studio.  This is NOT Python or C.  And there are minor inconsistencies in the IDE that you're going to have to learn and get used to the hard way.  For example the Flutter Inspector is handy for debugging graphical layouts, but it only scans the source code and widget tree when you click the refresh icon inside the Flutter Inspector; it would be logical if it rescanned when you "C-s" hot reload, but it does not.  Meanwhile the Flutter Outline code navigator, which is a logical view of the widget tree, more or less, auto reloads live as you type in the editor, no need to hit "C-s" to hot reload.  Another minor irritation is as of the date of this post in late 2021, Flutter and the IDE deprecate using the older RaisedButton so on the fly you get to modify your code to use ElevatedButton.  Which is good workplace experience LOL but it shows how rapidly things develop in mobile app world when a book less than a year old is technically somewhat out of date.

Overall the chapter does an excellent job of tossing the future Flutter developer in the deep end to learn to swim.  I worked thru the example IRL as I read the chapter and everything eventually worked.

Next up, chapter 4, "Flutter UI".