Programming in Dart: Fundamentals

Transcript: 01. Introduction Hey what's up everybody, this is Brian and welcome to Programming in Dart. In this course, you'll gain a solid understanding of how to program in the Dart language. Specifically, you'll learn all the fundamental concepts to get started writing code in Dart. Now, before you begin this course though, I recommend you start by watching our, Your First Flutter App Course, if you haven't already. That course is included with your raywenderlich.com subscription. And it gets you started with Dart and Flutter development by making a simple but fun app, and learning some basic Dart concepts along the way. This course picks up where that course leaves off. If you've already completed the Your First Flutter App course you've actually learned a lot about Dart programming while building your app, specifically, you've learned four major concepts in Dart. Number one, you should know how to use variables, and constants, and what the difference is. Remember, you use var for variables and const for constants. Number two, you should know how to use data types like ints and strings, for example, here's my age as an int and here's my name as a string. Note that these are written in long form here for clarity, but you can use Dart's type inference to write these without the types if you wanted. Number three, you should know how to perform basic operations like adding numbers or incrementing numbers. For example, I can increment my age with plus equals, or add two numbers together with the plus operator. Finally, number four you should know how to use if statements. Here's an example of writing an if statement to check if my dog Cosmos is still a puppy. He may not be still a puppy, but he's still cute. If you still feel rusty on any of these concepts, that's okay, you can go back and review the previous course, or you can keep watching because I'll continue to use those concepts throughout this course. Okay, in the first part of Programming with Dart I'm going to almost double your Dart core concepts by covering three new core concepts in Dart. You'll learn how to use DartPad, a really cool tool that allows you to test out code and see results instantly, and how to use comments to document your code to make it easier to understand. You'll also learn about the Boolean data type, which stores a simple true or false value and about a new set of operators called comparison operators that lets you compare values to each other. I'll then show you how logical operators work, and that you can use. Then, we'll revisit our old friend, the if statement and learn how to use to assign values using something known as a ternary operator. This course is designed to be hands-on where we'll explore Dart together step by step. It's very important you just don't watch the exercises, but actually follow along with DartPad. This helps you understand how to write code in the Dart programming language. In addition, the course contains several hands-on challenge where you'll get to practice what you've just learned on your own, it's in your best interest to actually pause the video, and try solving the challenges. You're going to learn a ton by doing this. This course is the first course in a series of four courses that aim to teach you the Dart programming language. Right now, you are here at the beginning. In the next course, you'll explore control flow, as well as some additional collection classes. In the third course, you'll learn about functions and closures. And finally, in the last course, you'll learn all about classes. With that said, it's time to get moving. By the time you're done with this part of the course you should have a nice Dart foundation, which you can use to dive even deeper into the language. So, let's get started by learning about DartPad and writing comments.