Your Second Flutter App

Hey what’s up everyone, this is Brian. Welcome to the third course in our Flutter Beginners Learning Path, where you’ll build your second Flutter app. If you’ve been following along the Flutter learning path, you’ve already created one app and dived into the Dart programming language. In this course, you’re going to level up your Flutter knowledge by building an app that replicates some of the features of the official raywenderlich.com app.

This app is called RWCourse. You’ll use the RW API to show a list of video courses, filter the list of courses navigate to a course detail screen, and launch a web page showing the course on the raywenderlich.com site. Whereas the your first complete Flutter app was a game to demonstrate app building in general, this app consists of a lot of techniques that you may be using in your own apps.

This course is broken down in five parts. In this first part, you’ll get started by creating a new app project and fetching data from raywenderlich.com. Here’s the breakdown of this part.

In the upcoming episode, we’ll use VS Code to start the RWCourses app from scratch.

Then, you’ll add to your knowledge of Dart by looking at the Future type, with which you run asynchronous code that returns a result in the future.

After which, you’ll get exposure to architectural considerations that occur in mobile app development, and create a model class to hold data and a repository from which your app can fetch data.

You’ll next make your first network call in Flutter, calling the RW API to retrieve a list of video courses.

Then you’ll learn how to parse the data obtained from the remote API to turn it into Dart objects in your code.

You’ll get some practice interacting with an API and parsing data returned from an API by adding more properties to the Dart model class.

Next you’ll parse some more complicated data returned from the API.

Finally, you’ll get an introduction to another big picture idea that you’ll run into frequently in app development called dependency injection.

This course builds on the knowledge you gained in the Your First Flutter App course and the Programming in Dart: Fundamentals course. You’ll need to have viewed those courses or have the equivalent knowledge in order to follow along with this course.

This course is designed to be hands-on, where we’ll build the app together step-by-step. It’s very important that you don’t just watch the exercises, but actually follow along. Open up Visual Studio Code, type along with me, and run the app we build in the either the iOS Simulator or an Android emulator. This helps you understand how the app gets built step by step.

In addition, the course contains several hands-on challenges, where you’ll get to practice what you’ve just learned on your own. It’s in your best interest to actually pause the video and try solving the challenges - you’ll learn a ton by doing this. There is a big difference between knowing the path and walking the path… And the only way to learn programming is to actually do it.

OK - so let’s get right into the code by creating the Flutter project for the course.