Mastering Xamarin.Forms - Second Edition: Build rich, maintainable, multi-platform, native mobile apps with Xamarin.Forms 2nd Revised edition

For beginners who are starting up with Xamarin, this is a good book. This helped me kick start.

I have been working with this book, page by page, and am surprised to find that already, at the time of this review (October, 2018) it's already been affected by changes. That being said, it's a great primer with a thorough step-by-step instruction on how to put an application together using MVVM and Xamarin forms (and providing some light on the elusive XAML). What's missing is the Whys. Why am I writing this line of code, how does it affect the underlying architecture of Xamarin.I will admit, trying to figure out Xamarin by looking at Youtube videos is a complete bust, and this book has become a blessing in as much as I can actually get something working. It is because of a thorough understanding of the .Net framework that I can comprehend what's being written. Not for the novice, and to the writer's credit, he does state that.Definitely worth the few bucks compared to some of the more books available out there.

It was a good intro to using Xamarin.Forms with a few notable exceptions:- The base application developed during the book is a map based travel log. Xamarin uses both Google Maps and Bing maps depending on platform. The author did not indicate anywhere that I could find that the user needs to acquire both a Google Maps API Key and a Bing Maps API Key. Fortunately I have used the Google Maps API doing web development and new a key is required. However it took some research to find where the Google Maps API Key needs to be specified and where the Bing Maps API Key needs to be specified.- the first couple of chapters the author did a good job of showing how to create a multi-form Xamarin.Forms apps. Then inexplicably he launched into a totally unnecessary rewrite of the application routing that was hard to follow because of the many updates requiring returning to modules over and over. All of this done with no good explanation of why he was doing all of that other than some esoteric statements that he was abstracting the routing from the user view. An explanation of what problem he was solving would have been useful and a more straightforward code implementation that did not require bouncing back and forth in the same modules would also have been good.Once the Google/Bing Map API Keys were actually acquired and initialized in the code the author's coding does actually work - unlike many technical books. However, anyone looking to implement Xamarin.Forms in Microsoft's Visual Studio should be forewarned that there are many issues in Visual Studio. Trying to implement the author's examples was frustrating due to the MANY, MANY problems with Xamarin in Visual Studio.Its hard to tell whether the problem is in Xamarin's implementation of the Xamarin.Forms.Maps or actually in Bing map processing but the example application did not work in the Windows Universal Development on the pc. It did work find on Android. Not the author's problem but still very frustrating when trying to follow along and Xamarin Forms processing fails.

This book is an essential resource for anyone building cross platform apps with Xamarin.Forms. It is practical, straightfoward and well written and replete with good examples.

Great information and read on Xamarin.Forms!

The book starts out well enough with good information on Xamarin Forms. It was annoying trying to track down unexplained permission issues in the Xamarin Forms manifest to stop the Xamarin Forms Maps from crashing. The learning curve in Chapter 3 - Navigation goes about vertical for a novice. There is almost zero discussion about namespaces or included system libraries that are needed for the examples. There is LINQ code dependency put in without mention (LINQ is great, but, it's also a complicated rabbit-hole for a novice). The brief mention that the author decided to create a ViewModel centered navigation service to follow MVVM principles rather than a view centered navigation made me curious, so I did some digging into MVVM, MVC, MVPVM, and how it all applies to Xamarin Forms.There is an ideological architectural 'purity' debate raging in the various forums that Xamarin Forms users frequent about navigation in Xamarin Forms. Whether apps should tie 1:1 pages with ViewModels or whether it is better to center navigation on pages (views) and handle the details in the ViewModel. The author subscribes to the ViewModel centered navigation and goes through an ingenious, but, complicated setup of implementing a navigation service model starting from setting up an interface and then implementing a XamarinFormsNavService based on that interface. It is useful practice and information, but, there is little explanation and zero hand-holding. The reader must understand LINQ, reflection, threading tasks and dependency fairly well or they will be in for some serious roadblocks.For a seasoned c# or .Net developer this is a fine book. For a novice such as myself with just a few month in C#, I will probably look for another Xamarin Forms book after I run through the examples in the chapters as well as I can. I don't appreciate the reliance on 3rd party apps and Azure, but, it's all interesting stuff to learn I suppose.

I was enjoying following the book and the application that was being built but ran into several code issues as the content became more advanced meaning I frequently had to lean on my own expertise (it just didn't look right in the book) or in some cases, revert to the source code supplied. The application also goes through several re-writes; why not give us the best practice method first instead of going over the same classes re-writing them to make them better?

I like all

Good, succinct and quite to the point, clearly written and well explained code samples complete the explanations. A good introduction