Programming in Dart: Classes

Amazing work! You’ve not only completed a course on understanding one of the most important aspects of Dart programming - that is, classes, you’ve also completed four courses on the Dart programming language.

If you’ve never coded a single hello world in your life - well then excellent job. Learning to code it really challenging. Let’s face it, when we write our programs, it looks as though we creating some confused arcane language but as you’ve seen, it’s all based on logic.

Now if you are coming from another language, also - excellent work. It can be hard to break out of your comfort zone and frustrating when learning a new approach. You may have been writing code for years using a certain convention, but now you are finding yourself having to relearn everything again.

Even if you never write another line of dart code again, this makes you a better developer. It exposes you to different thinking and may change how you approach other code in the future.

Okay, so this final part was interesting. It covered some advanced features when working with classes.

First you learned about inheritance and how objects can inherit code from each other. This allows us to share code so we aren’t reinventing the wheel every time we want to make variations.

Then you learned how to override a method. This allows for children classes to specialize their own behavior.

Then you learn about abstract classes and how to define interfaces with them.

After which, you learned how classes incorporate interfaces defined in other classes.

Then you learned how to incorporate generics into a class. That knowledge alone allows you to define your own collection classes.

You also learned about Mixins, giving you the ability add features to other classes.

Finally, you learned about all the various features that weren’t covered in this course. And there was lot.

But at this point - having gone through four courses on Dart, you should feel pretty comfortable with the language. You’ll be able to read along with tutorials and understand the meaning behind certain blocks of code. And of course, dive into the Flutter framework

But - they key thing to keep in mind is that you’ve just started with Dart. There is a whole lot of learning to do.

In fact, I suggest the first thing you do is to read the Dart Apprentice. This book will revisit all the topics in this course and even introduce some more. If you are new object orientated programming, you’ll want to learn about design patterns.

If you have professional subscription, you may want to check out Design Patterns by Tutorials. While written for Swift , it’s very much applicable to Dart and being that Dart and Swift share a lot of conventions.

Finally, if you are watching this as part of the Flutter learning path, keep watching - in the next course - Your Second Flutter App - you’ll be putting Dart to use by making your own version of the our mobile app.

In any case, thanks so much for watching this course. I hope you found it useful and I’ll see you in the next one. Cheers!