Xamarin is a platform for developing applications for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows using the C# language. Xamarin is relatively young, yet it is growing at a fast pace; as such, there are very few books covering app development on such a platform. Unfortunately, this book fails to provide anything but a soon-to-be-outdated reference on the basic components of the Xamarin iOS libraries, without giving guidance to the beginner or insights to the intermediate programmer.

The author doesn’t follow the path of building a working application across the book, touching on the different aspects of developing with Xamarin. Instead, he covers different topics with different levels of accurateness without putting together the puzzle of developing an app. The outcome is a patchwork of chapters, some of which look like a reasoned reference (“UI Controls” and “Events”) and some that are more well rounded (“Threading” and “Threading Tasks ”).

The reader is supposed to be proficient in C#, and should have at least a basic understanding of mobile app development. However, I wouldn’t suggest this book to anyone approaching iOS development in C#, as Xamarin’s documentation, recipes, and blog posts will outlast the contents of this book. Furthermore, Xamarin.Forms is the new cross-platform development library Xamarin is placing its bets on. As a developer, I’d hold out for Charles Petzold’s book [1].

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