Part 2. Core Dart

In this, the largest part of the book, you’ll learn about the core concepts, language features, and structure required for building Dart applications.

Chapter 4 introduces functions and closures, key concepts in Dart that will be new to developers more familiar with class-based languages such as Java and C#. Functions are core to the language, and anonymous functions are used everywhere, such as handling events from the browser or other systems.

In chapter 5, you’ll see how to create structured Dart applications by organizing your Dart project into libraries. Although Dart is a class-based language, libraries form the smallest unit of privacy in a Dart codebase, rather than classes; you’ll see how this can be used to good effect.

Chapters 6 and 7 introduce and expand on Dart’s class and interface structure and how you can achieve duck typing with Dart’s optional type system. Dart’s dynamic and Object types will make an appearance, and you’ll see how you can build rich type inheritance hierarchies.

Chapter 8 builds on the previous two chapters to show how you can overload the standard operators and build generic, general-purpose versions of your classes. It also explains how this technique is used in the generic collection classes and how you can use generics in your own apps.