
Set up Visual Studio Code for Dart development by installing the Dart extension, locating the Dart SDK, and creating a new console project, with essential shortcuts for formatting and debugging.
Build a degree app in Dart that uses nested if statements to map scores to letter grades (A to F with plus/minus), and explore random scores via the math library.
Explain Dart number properties and functions, including isOdd, isFinite, isInfinite, isNaN, absolute value, and rounding methods (round, floor, ceil, and rounding toward zero), plus the remainder operator.
Learn how to read user input in a Dart console app by importing dart:io, prompting for age or birth year with readLineSync, converting to numbers, and computing age with DateTime.now().year.
Learn how to handle runtime errors in Dart by using try-catch blocks, printing error messages, and applying specific catches for format exceptions, with an infinite loop to retry input.
Explore how lists, sets, and maps in Dart are iterable data structures that store multiple values, including dynamic types, accessed by index or key, and traversed with for loops.
Learn how to throw and handle exceptions in Dart using throw, try, and catch, with practical examples like an age calculator app validating birth year and invalid data handling.
Explore how Dart lambda expressions create anonymous functions in one-line or expression bodies, store them in variables, and apply them with for-each on lists.
Explore higher order functions in Dart, passing functions as parameters, using examples like some, edge, and for each, including lambda expressions.
Explain how the where function filters a list or set by a test, returning elements that satisfy it and showing first, last, index, remove, and optional parameters.
Explore how mixins enable combining class functionality in Dart, how abstract mixins work, and when to use extends with mixins or implements to share behavior.
Explain how streams differ from futures by producing a sequence of values over time, using periodic streams, listening to data, error, and done events, and controlling with subscription cancel.
Learn Dart file system basics by creating, checking file existence with exists and exists sync, reading and writing, deleting, and copying files with async and sync variants.
Create a final project in Dart that builds a quiz app with a math question model, input handling, and null safety using safe parsing and default values.
There are way too many programming languages and infinite use-cases for each one of them, every day developers are coming up with something new and we need to keep up with the flow.
Both of these technologies are relatively new when you compare them to the most popular languages and frameworks, they have been looking over for some years now but I would consider this combo to be ahead of its time like if you sold an electric car in 1995.
Let me tell you why:
What is Dart?
Let’s kick this off by explaining some qualities of Dart.
First, it is developed by Google and it launched in 2011. Google uses Dart to develop many of its main applications including Ads which as you can imagine must require quite a solid build.
Dart is very flexible in the way it is compiled and executed, it is in fact the only programming language capable of compiling JIT (Just In Time — used during development) and AOT (Ahead Of Time — used when the app is released), it can also be compiled to Javascript in order to be run by browsers or straight to native code. This means its execution is fast.
Thanks to its versatility Dart can be used for client or server-side development. The syntax looks like ‘C’ meaning it is statically typed so this provides more certainty on the types of values you are passing on, but it is also meant to be used in OOP, if you have a background in C you’ll pick it up quick. Dart also shares some similarities with Javascript like the use of arrows and asynchronous functions.
Let’s not forget about ‘hot reload’.
You can test your code like if it was HTML and you were refreshing the page to see the changes. Yes, it is that easy.
Dart has been slept on by the dev community for too long but I think its time is coming with the mobile-first principle that is gaining such massive momentum. It runs fast on all platforms and is easy to pick up and learn by programmers.