Flutter & Dart: SOLID Principles and Top Design Patterns

We all want to become better software developers and be able to call ourselves "Software Engineers" or "Software Architects", but to do that you first have to master a number of design patterns.

This course will put you on a track to that destination.

We will teach you how to recognize when to use specific design patterns to build complex systems in a divide-and-conquer manner so that complexity is reduced and abstracted.

But rather than learning all the design patterns out there, we have curated the most important, the top fundamental GoF Design Patterns for you.

All of that in the context of the Flutter Framework using Dart.

We start with full understanding of the S.O.L.I.D Design Principles and how they in turn relate to those design patterns. We eplain everything in the context of real-wprld problems as well as specific code examples.

At the end of the course you will get to Architect a solution by coding John Conway's Game of Life simulation which will run on your mobile device.

Complex software systems are plagued with three major issues:

1. Timelines are stretched as requirements change.

2. Multiple developers have a hard time coordinating their efforts.

3. Code redundancy.
   

This in turn creates issues with maintenance and overall flexibility for adding new features. In general this means poorly designed systems that are hard to maintain and are not adaptable.

One answer to all the above problems is having a proper design and architecture. Think of a skyscraper being built. There is always a high-level blueprint. This blueprint is used to show everybody involved (from architects to supply chain to construction workers to machinery scheduling etc…) what is being worked on.

Everybody understands and follows the same vision.

A blueprint has a number of commonly understood elements which repeat themselves across many projects. For example all buildings need electrical wiring and plumbing, they might need elevators, and cooling systems, and underground parking lots, and of course stairs. They also usually are connected to the electrical grid and water supply as well as… roads.

All these common elements follow certain standards that have been improved over many many years and across many many projects. They are well understood and can be used almost like recipes.

In Software Engineering we also have a set of elements that repeat themselves across many projects. For example all software applications need to create objects, they need to communicate state change across those objects, they need to be able traverse over collections of those objects. In other words, if you want to be a better developer then you need to become proficient in those elements that have been time-tested. In the Software Engineering world these elements are known as “Design Patterns”

This course will teach students how to recognize when to use specific design patterns to build complex systems in a divide-and-conquer manner so that complexity is reduced and abstracted.

This will help you to design projects in an Architectural manner before any major development happens and can be used to shorten development time and reduce maintenance costs.

Design patterns are important because they are time-tested recipes or solutions to well-known software engineering problems. When creating software applications certain problems recur in a pretty predictable fashion so rather than ‘reinvent’ the wheel we will have an assortment of, if you will, wheels to choose from.

We will teach you this in a slightly different manner than you probably have been taught before. We will take a practical approach (i.e. specific examples) but the power of Design Patterns comes from their ‘concept’ and we will teach you the concept of those design patterns so that you are fully able to change them and modify them to your needs. In addition we will look at how to combine all those patterns into something greater: an architecture.

A well designed Architecture is this magical thing where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This is what we will strive to teach you.