Flutter Apprentice Book Event – Recap
We’ve crunched the numbers on our recent Flutter Apprentice book club event — and the results are surprising! Come see what we learned in our partnership with the Flutter Community and the Flutter Team at Google. By Chris Belanger.
It’s no secret that we’ve been bullish as Flutter as a platform for some time, and with recent leaps forward in the framework including production support for Windows development, we couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds for Flutter.
We’ve recently concluded a fantastic partnership with the Flutter Team at Google, where we provided three months’ free access to our Flutter Apprentice book to support the Flutter Community Book Club event — and now that the dust has settled and we’ve had time to crunch the numbers, we’d like to share some of the insights with all of you dataheads!
How Many Readers Were Involved?
To be honest, we’ve never run an event like this, so we weren’t quite sure what to expect in terms of readership. Would 1,000 people sign up for the event? 5,000? After some deliberation and looking at past data, we thought that 10,000 total signups might be a great stretch goal.
Well, before I share that final number, let me show you what the graph of opt-ins looks like for the entire event. On the horizontal axis is the day of the campaign, starting at Day 0 (because, you know, developers). And the vertical axis is the total number of people that opted-in.
As it turns out, 10,000 total signups was a massively conservative estimate. We actually passed 10,000 total signups roughly 36 hours into the event! We’d expected things to level out after that point, but after two weeks, we were at 25,000 signups and growing. And even though the exponential growth of signups was pretty much over by that point, things settled into a linear growth mode, where we added, on average, 245 new signups per day.
At the end of the event, a total of 46,398 developers had signed up for the free access to Flutter Apprentice — and to put it simply, we’re thrilled. With the support of the Flutter Community, and especially to those who gave their time and effort to running the Flutter Apprentice Book Club, we’ve introduced over 46,000 developers to what we think is one of the best platforms out there — and one that’s growing every day.
What Did People Read?
As a publisher, we’ve known for a long time that hardly anyone reads programming books from cover to cover. (Okay, for the few of you that do, we salute you!) But most readers generally move through the first third of the book to get started with a new platform, or alternately use the book as a resource, dipping in where necessary, in order to get the information they need.
So we were curious: what did the reading patterns look like? Were people actually reading this thing?
Turns out – they did! And in huge numbers as well.
This chart shows the chapter number, compared to the number of people who read that chapter. As we expected, the majority of reading was clustered with the first two sections of the book: Build Your First Flutter App and Everything’s a Widget.
But what’s really interesting, past that point, is that reading didn’t taper off as quickly as we thought it would. Thousands of people worked through the entire book, which we think is simply amazing. And all told, that totals nearly a quarter of a million total chapter views, which is more than we ever could have hoped for.
Flutter Apprentice Book Club
We’d also like to point out one of the key elements of this event: the Flutter Apprentice Book Club, which was hosted by the Flutter Community, and is still available online. You can work through the book alongside the book club hosts, and they’ll provide some interesting insight even beyond what the book provides on its own. You can check out the first episode here:
Where to Go From Here?
When we began this event, we weren’t really sure where it was going to end up. But we’re so incredibly pleased with the response from the community, from the support we received from the Flutter Team at Google, and of course, from readers like you. If there ever was an event that defined success — this was it!
I’d encourage you to check out the Flutter Apprentice Book Club videos (linked above), and of course, our own Flutter content on the site. And if there’s something that you think we should cover on Flutter, feel free to leave a comment below!
On behalf of the entire Flutter Apprentice book team, a sincere “thank you” to everyone involved, and especially to you, our readers. Your support is what makes everything we do possible!