PEOPLE TAKE UP MOBILE DEVELOPMENT these days for a lot of reasons. For some it is all about learning something new, but for many it comes out of necessity of a job or career. Perhaps you see mobile development as the next big thing, just like client-server development was in the 1990s, or web development became in the 2000s. Maybe you’ve been asked to learn more about mobile development techniques and technologies to make a recommendation to your boss for an approach to get your company started building mobile applications. Or you might be an independent software consultant who’s feeling the demand for mobile software and is responding to the demand by learning the skills you need to stay ahead of the technology curve and deliver solutions to your customers.
Whatever your reason for picking up this book, thank you — and congratulations! Whether this is your fi rst foray into mobile development or you’ve been writing mobile applications for years, you’ve just taken the fi rst step on a journey that can be both technically challenging and tremendously rewarding. The technologies and techniques in this book can give you an edge over your competition. You then can speak authoritatively about mobile software best practices and proven enterprise mobility techniques wrought from years of experience. You can be confi dent recommending an approach for mobile development to your organization that can provide fl exibility across mobile platforms and architectures. You can be the hero who puts your company on a path that is optimized for future changes in the marketplace — one that can result in savings of both time and money by leveraging your existing skills in .NET and C# development. This book gives you everything you need to catch the wave. Join us on the incredible ride that’s only just beginning in mobile application development!
This book is written by professional developers for professional developers. It is not a book about technology for technology’s sake. The approaches outlined in this book, whether around choosing a mobile architecture, designing your user experience, or coding for reuse across platforms, come out of our experiences as professional developers in an enterprise setting. Solving the real-world business and technical problems facing companies across industries is the primary purpose of the material in this book.
This book is for experienced developers who are profi cient in the .NET Framework and the C# language. The concepts and examples provided in this book require a fundamental knowledge of object-oriented principles and software design patterns. You don’t need to know anything about mobile development. A basic understanding of the principles of layered architectures and the Model- View-Controller pattern is all you need. If you’ve ever written a web application using ASP.NET, you probably have the knowledge necessary to succeed with this book. You learn how to translate that skill and knowledge to become profi cient at mobile development. With a little study and determination, you can lead your organization into the world of mobile apps!
