Chapter 1, Getting Started with Xamarin, will help us discover the basics of cross-platform development and where its latest version Xamarin 4 fits. We'll also learn how to use the latest version, Xamarin Studio 6, as the IDE.

Chapter 2, Sharing Code between Platforms, will differentiate between Portable Class Libraries and Shared Projects. We will also explore the fundamentals of the MVVM pattern by using it.

Chapter 3, Exploring the UI Controls, will explain all the page types, layout types, view elements, and rendering models provided by the Xamarin framework out of the box.

Chapter 4, Data – the Monkeys Catalog, will show how the readers to create base types of entities, data access layers, business layers in order to use them along with any project that we'll develop. We'll also create core implementations of them.

Chapter 5, Cloud and Async Communication, will help us explore different formats, data, and channel types when communicating with a remote server. We'll explore the differences between a RESTful service and a WSDL service and develop a sample application.

Chapter 6, Custom Renderers, will describe customer renderers by creating one. Also, we'll learn to use AppLinks by example.

Chapter 7, Monkey Puzzle Game – Processing Images, will help us develop an example project from scratch. We'll develop custom renderers to complete the project.

Chapter 8, The People Around Me Application, explains how to develop an example project from scratch. We'll start preparing our development machine and end with a ready-to-publish application. We'll develop and communicate with a web backend in this example project.

Chapter 9, Testing – Spot the Bugs, will explain the importance of debugging, testing, and profiling. We'll learn about the different log panels of Xamarin Studio 6. We'll also learn the fundamentals of Xamarin Profiler and the Xamarin.UITest Framework.

Chapter 10, Publishing to the Market, helps us finalize this book by publishing a project to all three stores. Starting from building the project, we'll investigate the steps of creating developer accounts, readying the publish package, and uploading them to the stores.

You'll need a computer and reliable Internet connection. Here is a full-featured list of the required applications:

Apple requires iOS applications to be compiled on a Mac computer, Xamarin requires as well. All required applications can be downloaded from http://xamarin.com/download and https://www.visualstudio.com pages.

This book is great if you’re already familiar with C# and want to break down the walls of developing applications to a single platform. It’s assumed that you have a good knowledge of the object-oriented programming paradigm.

If you want to be familiar with developing applications to all three platforms (Windows, Android, and iOS), this book is for you.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can start creating a folder called Base and a folder called Core inside the main Xamarin Form project."

A block of code is set as follows:

using SQLite.Net.Attributes; 
 
namespace XamarinByExample.MonkeysCatalogue 
{ 
    public class BaseEntity<TKey> 
    { 
        [PrimaryKey] 
        public TKey Key { 
            get; 
            set; 
        } 
    } 
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "To use a WSDL, we need to right-click on the project and select Add a Web Reference:"

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