Chapter 12 Feedback

I’m not sure what the thinking is here. You show us a package that requires a lot of advanced features, form the perspective of a learner, like generic classes, you show us how to use only one HTTP verb, There’s code that generates errors (red squiggles) that isn’t really explained, this chapter is a hot mess. Maybe I dont understand the full scope or context of this chapter but having already written an API wrapper “by hand” in dart (generating and executing the request, parsing the response into dart class/objects, and returning to the wrapper function caller) I would honestly rather keep doing it that way than learn 1/8th of a flutter package that relies on advanced topics I haven’t really needed to use. Things like this are covered in the Dart Apprentice: Beyond the Basics so I don’t know why you would include advanced topics in an introductory flutter book. I would buy an add on book that focuses on working with APIs in dart and flutter if it were reasonably priced but I don’t think this chapter needs to be in the book.

One other frustrating thing, and I don’t say this to be mean, is the book seems to be written with a loose understanding of english that seems really polished, but polishing bad copy is just polished bad copy. It might be a good idea to focus on having one person write the book as an OS agnostic book and then polish it from there. While I’m happy there’s a 3rd edition I’m starting to get the sense that this book is making me put in more effort into reading the book itself, than understanding the concepts it’s supposed to convey.

EDIT: Maybe loose understanding of english isn’t the right way to explain it, the book is unfocused. It’s like attending a lecture by a tenured professor who’s about to retire in a week. It goes through the content without any focus or self awareness. it just…is content.

Wow, this is a triple diamond trail of a chapter. Have to say I agree with @kemmetdaniel on this. Perhaps Chopper is useful, and I’m sure I’ll come back to it and investigate as our apps do a lot of web service calls… but if this chapter doesn’t scare off new learners, I’m not sure what will. My eyes certainly glazed over on this one as I was thinking “yeah, neat, but is this library really worth the ugliness it imposes” case in point:

return FutureBuilder<Response<Result<APIRecipeQuery>>>

Sometimes our efforts to automate coding lead to an unreadable mess that is hard for someone new to the project to even understand what’s going on (or perhaps yourself returning to fix something years later).

As part as of the new update we are “refactoring” this chapter.
We’ll definitely take into account this feedback.

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