iOS Development with Xamarin Cookbook
A new Xamarin iOS book has just come out and if you’re programming for the iPhone on the Xamarin platform you will want it on your bookshelf. It’s titled “iOS Development with Xamarin Cookbook” and is written by Xamarin MVP Dimitris Tavlikos.
This book will take you from the first steps in writing and compiling an iOS application with Xamarin to working with advanced topics like writing multi-touch gestures and working with iCloud. The intended audience for this book are .NET developers new to iOS development and Objective-C developers who want to be able to use the Xamarin tools.
This is not a cross-platform guide. While a few topics have corresponding features with Xamarin.Android, this is an iOS only book. For example, chapter 12, “Multitasking”, covers the iOS specific APIs for running code in the background and how to respond to events raised by the background code.
The advantage of writing a guide for one platform is that Dimitris can go deep on specific features and APIs. Each chapter has a set of “recipes” that explain how to do a task. Each recipe is independent from the others. You don’t have to build the first four recipes in a chapter in order to try out the code for the fifth.
Each recipe follows a pattern.
- Recipe Name: First Dimitris describes what the recipe will do
- Getting Ready: What has to be done before the recipe code is written.
- How to do it: A series of steps that describe the code to write
- How it works: An in-depth description of what that code does
- There’s more: Addition information about this feature
- See Also: A list of other recipes that are related to this one
For me, the book was worth it just for chapter 14, Deploying. I don’t have to submit apps to App Store that often, it’s useful to have all of the steps required, all in one spot.