When we joined Google and entered the fascinating world of web browser development more than six years ago, the web was a different place. It was clear that a new breed of web apps was emerging, but the performance of the underlying platform left much to be desired. Given our background in designing and implementing virtual machines, building a high performance JavaScript engine seemed like an interesting challenge. It was. We implemented the V8 JavaScript engine from scratch and shipped it as part of Google Chrome in 2008, and we are very proud of the positive performance impact our work seems to have had on the entire browser industry.

Even though recent performance gains in web browsers have shattered most limits on how large and complex web apps can be, building large, high-performance web apps remains hard. Without good abstraction mechanisms and clean semantics, developers often end up with complex and convoluted code. Naturally, this problem gets exacerbated as the codebase grows. We designed the Dart programming language to solve this exact problem, and we hope that programmers will be more productive as a result.

Over the past year, we have read and written a lot of Dart code, and it is very satisfying to see how Dart inspires programmers to strive for concise, elegant programs. There is something very enjoyable about incrementally transforming prototypes into maintainable production software through refactorings and adding type annotations—and it definitely feels like Dart as a language scales well from small experiments to large projects with lots of code.

Dart: Up and Running is a practical guide that introduces the Dart programming language and teaches you how to build Dart applications. We hope you will enjoy the book and Dart.