Dart or Flutter - Which First? [closed]

Question

I am interested in learning Flutter. I see that Flutter is based on the Dart language. I am wondering, should I learn Dart first, then get into Flutter, or will I pick up whatever Dart I need to know doing a "Flutter crash course"?

I am not asking anyone to recommend a book or a course. I can find those myself. I am simply asking those experienced with Flutter, if a knowing Dart is a prerequisite to learning Flutter, or if I could just jump into Flutter with minimal working knowledge of Dart.

Answer 1

Of course, each situation is specific, I will tell you based on my experience. First of all, we need to know three things about you:

1. Do you have previous knowledge of any programming language?
2. Do you want to make a very simple app or a more complex one?
3. Do you want to follow a programming career?

Yes, I have previous strong knowledge

If you have previous knowledge in any programming language. As I had in java and python, it is much easier to learn a third programming language because you already know one of the most important parts, which is the programming logic.

In this case, only reading the Language tour | Dart would be enough for you to dive into Flutter Docs or a Flutter Udemy course.

No, I have no previous knowledge

In case you have no previous knowledge in any programming language. I would say to you, be patient and forget about doing things very fast. It is very hard to understand a plugin right away, even more, one like Flutter which is for mobile development.

I can't imagine a person without programming knowledge trying to understand a State Management pattern as Bloc or an Http request using http.

In this case, even though you want to be fast. I would recommend you to do a video course which would cover both Dart and Flutter at the same time as this one in Udemy: Learn Flutter & Dart to Build iOS and Android Apps.

But I would strongly suggest you read the entire Dart Documentation from beginning to the end. We are lazy and usually don't like to do that, but really knowing a language documentation saves you a lot of time when developing, remember about when you spent all day long trying to figure it out a bug that was only a coma or a letter that was missing because you didn't know the documentation very well.

I want to make a simple app

In this case, you could dive directly into a Flutter course, you have not too much requirements, this can be fast. You can even get a lot of sample code to use in your app. Remember, you don't have too much requirements you just want to be fast!

I want to make a complex app

Forget about speed, dive into both Dart Docs and Flutter Docs and also watch the Learn Flutter & Dart to Build iOS and Android Apps.

But remember,if you don't have time, you don't need to watch all the classes or read the entire documentation. Imagine you want to make a video app like youtube, why would you watch the google maps classes? Therefore, save time by removing what you will not use, but do not save time in the things you are going to use the most.

I want to be a good programmer

Bro, don't be lazy. Coding an app is very easy, writing quality code is very hard and few people do. I am an employee in Software Development, already hired more than 20 programmers and I can tell you that most of them were more than 5 years in the career and didn't know how to write quality code. Good code works and any third programmer can understand it.

Look at Google samples, read the plugin codes, check how they comment the code and always follow the Effective Dart: Style

This is what will make you different from all the other programmers.

Happy coding!

Answer 2

You can go through Dart's Language Tour: https://dart.dev/guides/language/language-tour and learn the basics (i.e. operators, functions, classes). I found it an easy language to understand.

Then try out Dart using the Dartpad: https://dartpad.dartlang.org/

After that, you can start playing around with Flutter. If you run into any problems, you can refer to the Dart Language Tour or the Flutter docs.

Hope this helps.