working through V3.0 Chapter 7 and just some humble feed back. consider adding a one or two line summary of what constitutes a simple app vs a complicated one. Kinda admitting my faults, I’m new to application development and I’ve already tried 2-3 times to write different things only to get into the projects and realize that what I’m trying to do is more massive than skills I have and tbh I have no idea what constitutes a simple app, i just know that I keep making complicated one EDIT: and even then you could just point to examples of large vs simple apps in the app store and a reader could extrapolate from there
@kemmetdaniel “simple” and “large” are relative.
Are you referring to the number of screens or the the number of files/folders?
How do you define them? Do you have apps that you define as simple and large?
Flutter Apprentice is an introductory book. For me, the apps in our book are simple.
I’ve worked on large apps that have many sub-projects with feature folders with many files within those. That type of real-world app would be too complicated for the Flutter Apprentice intended audience.
I will take your feedback to our Flutter team and book team leads.
1 Like
@spgms Erh, okay I want to pump the breaks for a moment so we can look at what you’re asking me here. You’re asking me a student in the middle of an introductory book on application development to estimate the size of what is considered “small” and “large”, after I posted to the forum " I have no idea what constitutes a simple (contextually read as: small) app, …" .
I don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish by, essentially, asking my question back to me or putting my feedback back on me. If I could answer:
How do you define them? Do you have apps that you define as simple and large ?
I wouldn’t have posted my feedback in the first place cause I would know and have that context. This is where I, the learner, am depending on you, the experienced teacher, to guide me; to set my expectation. That’s why I’m purchasing educational materials, because I don’t know.
Flutter Apprentice is an introductory book. For me, the apps in our book are simple .
I think what RW might not appreciate or has lost sight of is the sheer number of things a newbie developer has to learn and apply is huge. To write a “simple app” by your definition I have to learn:
1. the entire Dart programming language - which is a whole book by itself and took me 27 days to complete
2. App Structure and Navigation
3. App Theming
4. Rendering Widgets
5. FutureBuilders
6. Widget Nesting
7. Navigator 1 v. Navigator 2 context
8. go_router - because even to RW using raw navigator 2 in V2.0 was so convoluted it made sense to teach a convenience package instead.
9. The Chopper library
10. state management architecture
11. working with streams
12. working with databases
13. Provider - there are LITERALLY stand-alone classes on just this subject
That’s A LOT, 2 books worth one might say, to learn and apply to an application as a new developer, especially considering 99.999% of people working through your books will be relying on Stackoverflow, the books, and their notes to TRY and apply these to their project when it comes time to code their own projects. As well, we dont understand your jargon you can speak the language of a developer and research dev concepts, patterns, language features etc etc, but newbie devs don’t have the language to ask questions and we’re not working in the field so we have no way to learn other than these books. This is the first hurdle to understanding what a big/small app is, being able to build an app in the first place. When everything is new to you, everything is a big app because there are many concepts and language features to apply.
So what’s a solution?
I think Ray Wenderlich needs to solicit feedback from the community (because this might only be important to me), then discuss internally and synthesize their own answer to this question in the form of an update to chapter 13 of FA OR in Section 0, vi. introduction that talks about how to consume the book. otherwise I would suggest a stand alone product. do you already have such a thing?
NOTE Your “how to read this book” section isn’t even a how to read the book, it’s an outline of sections in the book. That’s not insightful and that’s nothing I couldn’t get looking at the TOC in the sidebar. It could be improved by giving me insight as to when I should stop and seek help and how I should seek help if I’m struggling as well as state your intentions for writing the book. Teach me to fish with this section of the book.
My Background in is in Systems/Cloud engineering, and like I am struggling now with this book, I see junior engineers get overwhelmed with the sheer number of clouds (7+), services in each cloud AWS has 150 alone, best practices of each service in each cloud, programming languages, S/CDKs, etc etc. When a junior in my org asks for mentorship / training, I usually end up stopping them, focus them on one thing so they build a core competency, and then task and guide them through tasks that build concentric circles of competencies. I teach them in a way that builds off a core skill set. Consider integrating that approach with chapter challenges that make us responsible for our own learning. Challeneges that halt progress, that the book’s app requires before we move on. It You’d be doing us a great service because you’d be both guiding us and setting expectations with appropriate challenges for a given location in the book.
I hope this helps and I’m sorry for such a long message, but I really believe in your products so I want to try and provide as much information as possible to improve the books. I’ve learned dart pretty well from DA and hope to learn flutter well from FA, but maybe I’m mistaken in this post and my expecations or feedback is poorly informed / unreasonable.
@kemmetdaniel thanks for the feedback. It helps a lot.
What’s important for us as a book team is to understand what a majority our readers need. I didn’t have enough information from your previous comment to provide to our author(s) where we may need to make changes or clarifications.
It’s my job as tech editor to make sure the materials’ technical aspect is clear. It sounds like there may be some areas for improvement. The details you provided above give us your perspective. We appreciate you taking the time to provide these details. Thank you.
There is a lot here and I want to ensure we can address your points. I don’t want to rush with a detailed reply, but we’ll get back to you.
While going through our book, if you have specific questions about the book content please take a look to see if others have had your question and if not then post your question here in the forum. Our authors, final pass editor Cesare, and I are here to help you through your learning process.
Thank you, again,
Stef
2 Likes
@kemmetdaniel I also want to add something on a personal note. I get where you’re coming from. We’re here to help you.
My “day job” is as a SQL database developer. In 2013, when I started mobile app development I was on my own and also struggled teaching myself how to do it. I had no idea how to apply my 27+ years of database programming to creating mobile apps. None of my friends nor co-workers were interested in creating mobile apps. I started teaching myself with Objective-C for Dummies and then I found raywenderlich.com. Flutter has made it a lot easier, but don’t get me wrong I still get stuck all the time.
There is a related resource that may help you in your learning process.
When Google bought our book for the world for a few months in the Fall/Autumn of 2021, the Flutter Community had a bookclub. Each week one of the Google Developer Relation Engineers led readers through his process of applying what was taught in Flutter Apprentice chapters to create another app. After each lesson he and Flutter Community leaders answered live viewers’ questions.
You can find the entire Bookclub here: Flutter Apprentice Bookclub on Flutter Community YouTube
I hope this helps.
Stef
1 Like
This is pretty cool! I’ll definitely give this a watch and funny enough the google promo is what brought me to RW and ended in me buying Dart and Flutter Apprentice!
Definitely helpful and encouraging, thank you 
1 Like