Programming in Dart: Control Flow & Collections

Congrats on making through this course. We covered a lot of concepts and while you may still feel somewhat confused with the language, you’ve actually come pretty far. You’ve built a nice foundation language.

You can create branching logic and loops while also containing your data in a variety of collection types. Using this alone, you can create some pretty complex programs but the fun is just starting. Let’s review what we just covered and where you will be going.

You started this part with the Map. The map is a great way to hold a collection of data. In other languages like Swift, the map is called a dictionary and I think that’s a better name for it. It makes it clear that the data structure is just a collection of keys and values. And like lists, you always want to use the same types to avoid potential bugs.

Then you learned how you can work Maps. You saw how to set values and update values which is quite important when working with maps.

Afterwards, you met the set which is like a list, except it can only contain unique values. Remember, sets do not keep their order. So if ordering is important, you can use a set to prune any duplicates, then convert it to a list which will maintain order.

Then you saw the operations you can make on a set such as to add two sets together, find the difference of sets, or find the commonalities.

And that’s it - we’ve now passed through our land of collections. There are a lot more collections, but for now, we’re going to moving on towards a world of functions and closures. These two concepts are where you can call code on demand and even perform a variety of operations on collections.

Believe it or not, we are halfway through our Dart programming course. If you are feeling a little confused about what was covered in this course, or the preceding course, then by all means, restart from the beginning. It’s really important you understand these concepts because they will become the basis on the next two courses.

Otherwise, take a break, get some sun and when you are ready, come in meet me in the next course where we cover functions and closures. I hope to see you there! Cheers!