Mobile Development with C#: Building Native iOS, Android, and Windows Phone Applications

This is a very succinct yet comprehensive overview of the Mono Platform using MonoTouch and Mono for Android. It's a short read, so every member of your team that writes code should read it. There is a caveat here that the author really doesn't highlight, but I believe is necessary for anyone wanting to be effective in writing truly native cross-platform apps: Mono is not a substitute for not knowing the iOS or Android APIs. This book does a fair job in explaining surface details about common elements of iOS and Android (and to some extent Windows Phone 7), but does not go into any great detail for any individual platform (this is not a criticism of the book...just keep this in mind when you set your expectations). What this book does extremely well is get you up and running with Mono. That's really all you need to know. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in creating cross-platform apps and other software. Just know that you MUST know the iOS and Android platforms to derive the maximum benefit. This book is perfect or those lucky (or unlucky) few who write native apps in iOS AND Android, and are looking for a great way to DRY and still run truly native. There's plenty of room and material for a second edition, so keep'em coming!

This book is a good beginners book. However, keep in mind that much of the books contents is slightly outdated by now and some of the code samples will need to be adjusted. Nevertheless, I found that all topics in the book were described in enough depth for someone to reproduce in their own app. If you are already have experience with mobile app development in C# and Xamarin, this book may not be for you.

The author doesn't try to cover too much background in this book, which is a good thing. Books on cross-platform development are still few and far between. This one does a good job of getting the reader up to speed with ease, citing references for background reading instead of putting a lot of filler on background of .Net, etc.. The amount of background material is just enough. Get this book if you are doing any mobile development with C#/mono and the Xamarin products. It has a good yet simple explanation of how to create abstractions of various things an application needs to do and then flesh out those abstractions with platform-specific pieces when working with one phone versus another.

I am an experienced programmer and I understand C#, but I am not an avid developer and was hoping to tackle learning C#, as well as getting into iOS and Android development at the same time. The first part of this book (what was viewable without buying) made it seem like the perfect book, but once I got into the book a bit, I realized the book was more about combining a solid working knowledge of C# and native mobile development using Xamarin Studio and Mono. Also, this book is for Mac users. I took for granted the fact that it might be platform specific since I assumed that a C# book was going to be PC friendly.

Excellent book for experienced developers who are trying to get their feet wet with mobile development. The examples presented in the book were easy to follow and complete.

Note that this is very out of date now, almost irrelevant.

The book was great. I learned a lot. I recommend to anyone wanting to learn mobile development. This is what I needed.

Mobile development with C# is a great introductory book for cross platform development with MonoDevelop (now Xamarin Studio) and Visual Studio (for Android and Windows Phone). To get the most from this book you should have a god working knowledge of C#. The book introduces some nice patterns that are useful, not only in the implementation of cross platform development, but also in general for object oriented development. The only bad thing about the book is that it is too short, and, this is a personal thing but I like books that have exercises that encourage readers to think for themselves as they practice what they are learning. 5 out of 5 though a very god read with heaps of useful information.

Eignet sich aber nicht für den Quereinstieg. Die Inhalte sind klar strukturiert und sehr interessant. Auch die die Codebeispiele sind sehr gut beschrieben. Sehr schönes Buch, das mir aber als Einsteiger zu komplex war.

This book is a reasonable introduction to the topic but don't expect it to be the only book you'll need - It's pretty thin and doesn't cover much but should get you started. The majority of the book covers getting a few fairly straightforward demo apps working on iOS, Android and Windows phone. The book seems to assume familiarity with the various platform SDKs and UI toolkits so unless you know those already you're going to need to do some additional reading/research outside of what the book covers.

Sehr schöner Coding Stil wird darin demonstriert (Code wird entkoppelt, es wird mit events gearbeitet, Interface Injection, ...) Es wird vorbildlich gezeigt, wie man xamarin optimal nutzt und eine zentrale Library aufbaut, die unabhängig von der späteren Ziel-UI ist. So sollte man heutzutage programmieren. Dass noch Windows Phone 7 benutzt wird, statt 8 ist nicht das Problem (phone 8 gab es zu der Zeit ja noch gar nicht), auch nicht, dass es jeweils neuere Versionen von XAMARIN touch und android gibt, die auch leicht anders heissen, aber sehr unschön fand ich, dass 2 ganze Kapitel sich mit einem Twitter-Beispiel befassen, welche nicht funktionieren! Sie rufen via REST tweets als XML ab. Mittlererweile hat aber Twitter diesen Service umgestellt, dass dies nur noch authentisiert erlaubt ist, was in dem Beispiel nicht berücksichtigt wird, und es ist heute bei Twitter kein XML mehr erlaubt, sondern nur noch JSON. Schade, damit sind die Beispiele immer noch informativ, aber man kann sie nicht mehr ausprobieren. Ich bin gerade bei Kapitel 6 und das waren die Kapitel 4 und 5. Es können also noch mehr solcher Überraschungen auf mich warten. Fazit: vor einigen Jahren 5 Sterne, Tendenz abnehmend ... Von daher die Sternebewertung: "Nicht schlecht"

It helps to know something of using Xamarin before delving into this book, not to mention being aware that this book is intended to help develop cross platform apps with Xamarin tools.