Every app you will ever build, from a church attendance tracker to a banking app, is made of the same small building blocks: values, decisions, repetition, functions and data structures. Employers notice quickly whether a junior developer understands these basics or has only copied code from tutorials. This section makes sure you really understand them.
Why Dart
This roadmap uses Dart because it is the language of Flutter, the framework you will build apps with. Dart is a good first language too:
- Its syntax looks like many other popular languages, so later moving to Kotlin, Java, JavaScript or Swift is easier.
- It is typed, which means it checks many mistakes before your program runs.
- It has null safety, which protects you from a very common type of crash.
- You can practise it free in DartPad, in any browser, with no install.
What this section covers
- Variables, types, decisions and loops. Storing values such as a price in cedis, choosing what to do with
if, and repeating work with loops. - Functions, lists and maps. Packaging work you do often, and holding many values, such as every item in a shop's stock list.
- Classes, objects and null safety. Describing real things like a customer or a product, and handling values that might be missing.