Historical errata for Programming Flutter

Below section is on Flutter Plugin installation for VSCode but mentions Android Studio —

VSCode

To install the Flutter plugin for Android Studio you need to open Visual Studio
Code, then use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift -P to open the command palette,
then type “Install extensions” and press Enter .
On the panel that opens up on the left, type Flutter and press Enter .
Click the Install button in the Flutter entry in the list, this will install both
the Flutter and the Dart plugins.

Just downloaded b2_0 and found that (at least in Mac Preview) none of the TOC and bottom-of-page links are live. All of the footnotes I tried are live, but code links and in-line links to other chapters are dead.

Second bullet point on the page:
quotes inside the string ’“He said: ”Hi!“” are not escaped.

Note that there seems to be a spurious single curly quote before the first double quote as well.

The title of the second code snippet is ‘firstapp/lib/starting.dart’.
The text above says to ‘create a file called main.dart’, and also ‘Inside main.dart, write the following’.

Note that on page 7 the code snippet als has the title ‘firstapp/lib/starting.dart’.

First line of third paragraph:
Because of this, they are more complex that stateless widgets
should be
Because of this, they are more complex than stateless widgets

Second line of second paragraph:
and, after that, indented inside, it
should IMO be
and, after that, indented inside it,

Second line of the code snippet at the top

width: 50.0,
should be
width: 200.0,

since the text on the previous page mentions ‘limited to a 200x50 rectange’

First link on the page
Asynchronous code in Dart: the, on page 305
should be:
Asynchronous code in Dart: the dart:async library, on page 305

Can you explain the need for the Padding widget, in light of the Container widget also having a ‘padding’ and ‘child’ option. Flutter documentation states that Container makes use of the Padding widget via composition. So for beginners it’s not really necessary to think up different use cases when to use Padding and when to use Container: it’s simpler to always use a Container as a rule of thumb.

Chapter 2 is very, very, long. In particular the ‘Vertical Layout’ section.
How about splitting the chapter into two, e.g. ‘Laying Out More Widgets’ and ‘Laying Out Even More Widgets’, or ‘Laying Out in 1 dimensions’ and ‘Laying Out in more dimensions’?

On is the image,
should be
One is the image,

The full main.dart code starting at the bottom of the page is missing

import ‘OurButton.dart’;

In the section ‘The Container and the BoxDecoration’ the first bullet:
‘we can choose to costrain’
should be
‘we can choose to constrain’

Third bullet
‘which are used specify’
should be
‘which are used to specify’

In the second paragraph of the section ‘Displaying Images’:
‘On is the Image’
should be
‘One is the Image’

and in the last paragraph on the page:
‘an URL’
should be
‘a URL’?

‘Setting an height higher or lower than the
height the image will end up being normally’
should be:
‘Setting an height higher or lower than the
height of the view’

and:
‘if yyou’ should be ‘if you’

I would find it more logical if you explained how to create an AssetBundle right after you list the various methods to load data from an AssetBundle. Now there is the small section ‘AssetBundles and the rootBundle’ in between. Maybe the book can also explain when or why to use AssetBundle.loadString() vs. rootBundle.loadString().

First of all, thanks for your book. I am enjoying it and learning.

On my iOS devices, the code formatting is not monospaced and the indents are lost, making it hard to read.

The Kindle app on MacOS seems however to not exhibit this rendering problem.

I read a lot on the train using my portable device and this improvement would be very welcome.

The link in footnote 3 results in a 404 - Page Not Found

The sentence was apparently in the midst of being reworked:

because it’s not worth it to generate real pseudo-random numbers isn’t worth it and would have a less realistic result):

On the left of the numbers

should read

To the right of the numbers

The following text is awkward and possibly grammatically incorrect:
What we have done is simply displaying …

Suggestion:

What we have done is to simply display …

Similarly, the first Row widget (the one containing the delete buttons, shown in the code on page 86) will have to be replaced with:
Expanded(
flex: 1,

flex: 1 should be flex: 3

section title reads:

“Adding the AppBar Action to the Comic Path”

should be:

“Adding the AppBar Action to the Comic Page”

source code for

void _addToStarred(int num) { … }

contains reference to variable: docsDir and isStarred

it is not clear where docsDir belongs as the _ComicPageState class is shown as:

class _ComicPageState extends State {
@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
// return Scaffold(…)
}
}

on page 193 it is stated that isStarred must be added to the _ComicPageState class. But no mention of docsDir is made.

chapter 5 source code includes a file called:
dialog.dart
it seems to have been meant to retry/cancel a network request if no connection is available. but there is no mention of this file or what it is supposed to do anywhere in the chapter 5 text.

Under “Authentication” section. First sentence reads:

“Authentication requires its own firebase_auth package 4 and can be configured
in Flutter’s console by going to Develop -> Authentication -> Sign-in method.”

it should be:

“Authentication requires its own firebase_auth package 4 and can be configured
in Firebase’s console by going to Develop -> Authentication -> Sign-in method.”