Preface

Since the first public release of Dart in 2011, the language evolved a lot. Its first stable release in November 2013 marked the point when it was the time to start taking it seriously in the production environment. Dart 1.9+ might, at first sight, look like what JavaScript could be if it was designed for today's Web. It combines the best of many other languages while targeting both browser and server-side development.

Dart isn't the answer to every problem on the Web. There are situations where it seems like it's overly complicated to use Dart or it just isn't good at what you need, and you might be right. There are circumstances where it's better to use JavaScript.

This book tries to be objective. We won't try to convince you that from now on, you should use only Dart, and we'll talk about situations where Dart isn't the ideal solution. At the same time, we'll show you where Dart is great, how you can write well-structured code for both the browser and the server, and how easy it is to write understandable asynchronous apps with Dart 1.9.

Even though this book can't go into great detail about each topic, after reading this book, you should see for yourself that Dart makes sense and you should at least give it a try. It's not just the language but also the IDE, comfortable debugger, dependency management, runtime profiler, and more.