Microsoft MVPDNN MVPXamarin Certified
I'm Andrew Hoefling, and I work for FileOnQ as a Lead Software Engineer building mobile technologies for Government, Financial and First Responders using Xamarin.
Mastering Xamarin.Forms the Third Edition is a great book for both seasoned Xamarin developers and beginners just starting a Xamarin.Forms project. It is a great resource for many techniques needed to solve the complex problems of Xamarin.Forms application development.
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I was given a free copy of the book from the publisher in return for writing a review of the book. While the book was free, the opinions expressed here are mine alone and do not represent the opinions of the publisher or author.
This book follows a developer as they build a travel app from start to finish. Each chapter follows the progression of a full Xamarin.Forms app and as the book progresses each concept builds on itself. The coding samples provided are complete enough for you to follow along on your development machine.
This style of writing gives you a tutorial like experience, as opposed to just reading techniques the reader can see how it will work in the real world.
Every chapter builds upon itself from building a UI in XAML to advanced techniques such as Dependency Injection and communicating with an API backend. Even the complicated chapters provide clear code samples and guides so the beginner should not get too confused.
I enjoyed seeing walkthrough tutorial style chapters that explained with images how to use Visual Studio or the Azure portal when creating Azure Functions.
Each chapter is broken down to concrete topics such as
As each chapter tells the developer's story, they also serve as a great reference to look up in the future. For example, every single time I implement Authentication I need to look up a blog, documentation or how I did last time. This book provides a great reference with examples for me to reference next time I go to implement Authentication
I really enjoyed reading this book and as a Dyslexic programmer I was able to read this book over a weekend.
I'm planning to recommend this book or future editions to my team and new team members. Not because this explains any particular topic in great detail, but because it gives the reader a great understanding of all the different topics and solutions in the Xamarin.Forms ecosystem.