Dart 1 for Everyone: Fast, Flexible, Structured Code for the Modern Web

Psst! You’re not stuck with JavaScript anymore. Google’s Dart language makes programming for the Web simpler, faster, and more powerful. With version 1.0 in 2013 and an ECMA standard in 2014, Dart is ready to radically change web development for the better. And Dart 1 for Everyone has got you covered. Completely updated for Dart 1 and the ECMA standard, with new sections on new Dart features like method cascades, event streams, and class constructor syntax, this book wastes no time in immersing you in the finer points of this powerful and surprisingly beautiful language.

Dart has changed significantly since the first printing of this book and Dart 1 for Everyone has kept up. Every chapter has been revised and some chapters have been almost completely rewritten since the first printing. The MVC project chapters dumped the old JavaScript-like event handlers for the sleek new streams interface, and the chapter on testing reflects the extensive changes in testing now available in Dart.

Brand-new sections explore some of Dart’s beautiful new features, such as:

Method cascades: Improve code readability dramatically.

Event streams: Simplified event handling, consistent with virtually every other asynchronous interaction in Dart.

Library parts: Yet another way Dart promotes code organization.

New class constructor syntax: Dart supports a nice variety of surprisingly expressive and concise ways to declare constructors.

* Building your own packages: Quickly share your work with the world.

You’ll start writing Dart code on page 1, and throughout the book, you’ll refactor that code to explore Dart’s features: OOP, real libraries and packages, testing, and more. You’ll learn how to write beautiful, maintainable application code that just works in all modern browsers. Caution: after reading you may develop an intense attachment to structured code and skinny jeans.

What You Need:You will need the Dart SDK, which is freely available from https://dartlang.org. Most of the book works with Dartium, a preview release of Chrome that is included in the SDK and has the Dart VM built-in. Some of the examples use either the dart2js tool or the Dart Editor to compile Dart down into JavaScript – both are part of the SDK.

Table of Contents

Part I Getting Started
Chapter 1. Project: Your First Dart Application
Chapter 2. Basic Types
Chapter 3. Functional Programming in Dart
Chapter 4. Manipulating the DOM
Chapter 5. Dart and JavaScript

Part II Effective Coding Techniques
Chapter 6. Project: MVC in Dart
Chapter 7. Classes and Objects
Chapter 8. Events and Streams

Part III Code Organization
Chapter 9. Project: Extracting Libraries
Chapter 10. Libraries

Part IV Maintainability
Chapter 11. Project: Varying Behavior
Chapter 12. Testing Dart

Part V The Next Level with Dart
Chapter 13. Project: An End to Callback Hell
Chapter 14. Futures and Isolates
Chapter 15. HTML5 and Dart