The number of mobile devices and their usage is exploding rapidly across a wide variety of users around the world, heralding a series of very unique opportunities. For businesses, the opportunity to conceptualize new business applications and ideas, prototype, develop, and deliver these new capabilities to the market is very important. Customers benefit by being able to interact with brands and functions that have a direct and materially positive impact on their daily lives.

It sounds easy, but the major challenge today for a business is how to best support a dizzying array of mobile devices that are constantly evolving. Instead of targeting individual devices, such as the iPhone 6 or Samsung Galaxy 4, businesses begin to target device platforms, such as iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Still, significant challenges remain when trying to quickly deliver powerful mobile application functionalities across multiple platforms.

This is where PhoneGap has such a significant role to play. Put simply, PhoneGap helps businesses develop mobile applications faster for a large variety of devices with minimum cost and time. To be successful, it's incredibly important to analyze the user's requirements upfront and then select the best tool and platform for development. Leveraging the correct APIs and programming models, techniques, and UX patterns can make the difference between a mobile application that is compelling and one that is too hard to use.

Keeping all of this in mind, this book seeks to educate developers on how to develop code in PhoneGap. As written by Purusothaman, I think you will find that this book is quite different from traditional development books. For example, each chapter is appropriately narrated for both the beginner and advanced level users. The examples covered in each chapter are simple and easy to understand but are still thorough enough to deliver important insights and lessons. The examples provided, and especially the sample project at the end, are very useful to PhoneGap programmers.

I would strongly recommend this book to those who want to get started with mobile application development or those who are already developing mobile applications to learn PhoneGap as a cross-platform tool to deliver compelling mobile applications.

Ranga Srinivasan

CTO & President, Ameex Technologies