If you are planning to enter the tech world as a developer, nothing can be better than making your career as a mobile developer.
To help you get started, we have put together a list of must-read books for mobile developers. These books will jumpstart your career and help you along the way.
Here are 5 solid reasons to learn mobile development and giving your career a jumpstart:
It's open-source: Android is an open-source platform. It means you have the access to everything you need and you may create anything you want.
Handsome salaries: Mobile developers are among the highest-paid professionals in the IT industry. With a whopping 6-digit salary within a couple of years, it’s sure to give your life that extra luxury.
The book should contain a variety of instructional materials, including exercises, examples, questions, learning activities, and other features that promote the reader's engagement and active learning.
It uses clear, precise, and easy-to-understand language.
Content must be up-to-date and should thoroughly teach and explain the basic concepts of mobile development.
Contain assignments for practice and hands-on experience.
To help you in selecting a well-structured and latest book for mobile developers, we have narrowed it down to the best books for mobile developers. Any mobile developer that wants to make it big in the industry must have these books in their collection.
Beginning App Development with Flutter: Create Cross-Platform Mobile Apps by Rap Payne is a great book to get started with Flutter. This book will get you up and running on Flutter without the feeling of slogging through the process.
This book breaks down complex concepts and tasks into easily digestible segments with examples, pictures, and hands-on labs with starters and solutions. After reading the book, you will be able to:
Get the most out of great Flutter widgets
Create custom widgets, both stateless and stateful
Exercise expert control over your Flutter layouts
Make your app respond to gestures like swiping, pinching, and tapping
The information in this book is laid out in a way that's easy to follow and the chapters all flow together seamlessly. The book is divided into twelve chapters and includes the following topics:
Chapter 1: Hello Flutter
Chapter 3: Everything Is Widgets
Chapter 4: Value Widgets
Chapter 5: Responding to Gestures
Chapter 6: Laying Out Your Widgets
Chapter 7: Navigation and Routing
Chapter 8: Styling Your Widgets
Chapter 10: Your Flutter App Can Work with Files
Chapter 11: Making RESTful API Calls with HTTP
A chapter would talk about 10-15 features with code snippets. The prose is accessible and palatable, but very direct and useful. This book gets right to the point but makes the information interesting and relevant.
Native Mobile Development: A Cross-Reference for iOS and Android by Shaun Lewis and Mike Dunn is a hands-on guide that shows you how to perform the most common development tasks for iOS and Android.
This book is divided into two parts. The first part is a list of common, platform-agnostic tasks, like writing a file to local storage or creating an HTTP request. The second part walks you through creating a bare-bones app in each platform, utilizing the techniques from Part I. Let's have a look at the contents:
Chapter 1 covers UI Controllers
Chapter 2 covers views
Chapter 3 covers Custom Components
Chapter 4 talks about User Input
Chapter 5 talks about message passing
Chapter 6 covers Files
Chapter 7 covers Persistence
Chapter 8 covers Concurrency (Multi-Threading)
Chapter 9 covers Networking
Chapter 10 covers User Feedback
Chapter 11 covers User Preferences
Chapter 12 covers Serialization and Transports
Chapter 13 covers Extensions
Chapter 15: Welcome and Environment Setup
Chapter 16: Building an App
Chapter 17: Listing Data in the App
Chapter 18: Modeling Our Library
Chapter 19: And Yet, We Persisted
This book is for any native programmer working either exclusively with a single platform or with both.
Learn Simply: Android Mobile Application Development using Kotlin by Iyad Abu Doush helps you to learn in simple steps how to develop mobile applications using Kotlin. First, you will be introduced to Kotlin programming. After that, you will learn how to use Kotlin for Android mobile development.
Android and Kotlin
First Mobile Application
Activity Life Cycle
RESTful Web API
Cloud Database - Firebase
This book is a complete reference and is easy to follow. It includes examples that help to make the concepts clear.
More books you may like:
Learn Java for Android Development by Peter Späth and Jeff Friesen includes the latest Java SE releases that Android supports, and is geared towards the Android SDK version 10.
It includes new content including JSON documents, functional programming, and lambdas as well as other language features important for migrating Java skills to Android development.
Discover the latest Java programming language features relevant to Android SDK development
Apply inheritance, polymorphism, and interfaces to Android development
Use Java collections, concurrency, I/O, networks, persistence, functional programming, and data access in Android apps
Parse, create, and transform XML and JSON documents
This book is divided into seventeen chapters and includes the following topics:
Chapter 1 guides you to get started with Java
Chapter 2 covers Learning Language Fundamentals
Chapter 3 talks about discovering Classes and Objects
Chapter 4 talks about discovering Inheritance, Polymorphism, and Interfaces
Chapter 5 talks about Mastering Advanced Language Features, part 1
Chapter 6 talks about Mastering Advanced Language Features, part 2
Chapter 7 explores the Basic APIs, Part 1
Chapter 8 explores the Basic APIs, Part 2
Chapter 9 explores the Collections Framework
Chapter 10 covers Functional Programming
Chapter 11 explores the Concurrency Utilities
Chapter 12 talks about Performing Classic I/O
Chapter 13 Accessing Networks
Chapter 14 talks about Migrating to New I/O
Chapter 15 talks about Accessing Databases
Chapter 16 talks about working with XML and JSON Documents
Each of the book’s chapters provides an exercise section that allows you to reinforce your understanding of the chapter’s material. After reading the book, you will be ready to begin your Android app development journey using Java.
React and React Native by Adam Boduch and Roy Derks is a complete hands-on guide to modern web and mobile development with React.js. It covers the latest features of React such as Hooks, Suspense, NativeBase, and Apollo. This updated fifth edition reflects the current state of React, including React framework coverage as well as TypeScript.
The book will help you to build React applications for the web and React Native applications for multiple mobile platforms. Here is what you will learn in the book:
Explore React architecture, component properties, state, and context
Work with React Hooks for handling functions and components
Fetch data from a server using the Fetch API, GraphQL, and WebSockets
Dive into internal and external state management strategies
Build robust user interfaces (UIs) for mobile and desktop apps using Material-UI
Perform unit testing for your components with Vitest and mocking
The book is divided into twenty-eight chapters and includes the following topics:
Chapter 1: Why React?
Chapter 2: Rendering with JSX
Chapter 3: Understanding React Components and Hooks
Chapter 4: State Management in React
Chapter 5: Event Handling - The React Way
Chapter 6: Crafting Reusable Components
Chapter 7: Handling Navigation with Routes
Chapter 8: Code Splitting Using Lazy Components and Suspense
Chapter 9: User Interface Framework Components
Chapter 10: High-Performance State Updates
Chapter 11: Fetching Data from a Server
Chapter 12: State Management in React
Chapter 13: Server-Side Rendering
Chapter 14: Unit Testing in React
Chapter 15: Why React Native?
Chapter 16: React Native Under the Hood
Chapter 17: Kickstarting React Native Projects
Chapter 18: Building Responsive Layouts with Flexbox
Chapter 19: Navigating Between Screens
Chapter 20: Rendering Item Lists
Chapter 21: Showing Progress
Chapter 22: Geolocation and Maps
Chapter 23: Collecting User Input
Chapter 24: Displaying Modal Screens
Chapter 25: Responding to User Gestures
Chapter 26: Using Animations
Chapter 27: Controlling Image Displays
If you need a deep understanding of how to use Facebook's UI libraries, React and React Native, for mobile and web application development, this is a book for you! All you need is a working understanding of JavaScript programming.
iOS Development with Swift by Craig Grummitt is a hands-on guide to creating apps for iPhone and iPad using the Swift language. This book fully covers Swift 4, Xcode 9, and iOS 1. It takes you through the experience of building an app, from idea to App Store.
The book consists of four parts and seventeen chapters:
Chapter 1: Your first iOS application
Chapter 2: Introduction to Swift playgrounds
Chapter 4: View controllers, views, and outlets
Chapter 5: User interaction
Chapter 6: Adaptive layout
Chapter 7: More adaptive layout
Chapter 9: Tables and navigation
Chapter 10: Collections, searching, sorting, and tab bars
Chapter 11: Local data persistence
Chapter 12: Data persistence in iCloud
Chapter 13: Graphics and media
Chapter 14: Networking
Chapter 16: Distributing your app
After setting up your dev environment, you'll learn the basics by experimenting with Swift playgrounds. Then you'll build a simple app layout, adding features like animations and UI widgets. Along the way, you'll retrieve, format, and display data; interact with the camera and other device features; and touch on cloud and networking basics.
The book has a practical approach with a lot of real-world examples. If you want to learn how to write an iOS app from beginning to end, this is the book!
Chapter 1 gives the introduction to python
Chapter 2 covers the python basics
Chapter 3 talks about conditions and loops
Chapter 4 covers object-oriented programming (OOP)
Chapter 5 talks about standard libraries
Chapter 6 guides the reader in getting started with Kivy
Chapter 7 talks about Kivy basics
Chapter 8 talks about Layouts
Chapter 9 helps you in designing user interfaces
Chapter 10 covers UX widgets
Chapter 11 guides you in graphic handling
Chapter 12 talks about packaging app for various platforms
All the chapters offer questions and exercises for a better understanding of the subject. At the end of the book, some hands-on projects are given to help the readers to improve their programming and project development skills.
Developing a Mobile Application UI with Ionic and Angular by Michael D. Callaghan guides you every step of the way, from zero code to publishing on the Apple App and Google Play Stores.
Introduction to Ionic and Angular: You’ll learn about these powerful frameworks for mobile application development.
Building Your First Ionic App: You’ll get hands-on experience developing your first mobile application.
Creating a New Project: You’ll put your knowledge into practice and start building a new application from scratch.
Adding Key Functionalities: You’ll learn to create interactive and user-friendly components, such as a student roster.
Mastering User Experience Elements: You’ll understand important aspects of mobile app user experience, such as confirmation and notification systems.
Applying What You Have Learned: Next, put your newfound skills to the test and start applying them to real-world projects.
Setting up Your Development Environment: You’ll learn to install and use the necessary tools for a seamless workflow.
This book is more than a guide; it's a comprehensive toolkit that empowers you to create and deploy your own iOS or Android mobile app.
Elevate SwiftUI Skills by Building Projects by Frahaan Hussain teaches you to build four real-world modern applications using Swift, Xcode 14, and SwiftUI for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. You’ll learn how to use the latest SwiftUI features such as UIkit. The book enhances your applications further with advanced SwiftUI features
Start with a quick recap of UI essentials in Swift and Swift basics
Discover how UI elements are integrated into apps
Understand how SwiftUI builds on top of the pre-existing Swift programming language
Familiarize yourself with the latest Xcode version to create SwiftUI apps
Develop a wide variety of applications that can be used as cornerstones
Swift and SwiftUI Recap
iPhone Project - Tax Calculator Design
iPhone Project - Tax Calculator Functionality
iPad Project - Photo Gallery Overview
iPad Project - Photo Gallery Enhanced View
Mac Project - App Store Bars
Mac Project - App Store Body
Watch Project - Fitness Companion Design
By the end of this book, you'll have built fully functional projects across multiple platforms and gained the expertise needed to excel as a professional SwiftUI developer.
The books for mobile developers featured in this post will help anyone looking to gain insight into the growing field.
Coursera: Android App Development Specialization enables learners to successfully apply core Java programming languages features & software patterns needed to develop maintainable mobile apps.
Course 1: Java for Android
Course 2: Android App Components - Intents, Activities, and Broadcast Receivers
Course 3: Android App Components - Services, Local IPC, and Content Providers
Course 4: Engineering Maintainable Android Apps
Udemy: iOS & Swift - The Complete iOS App Development Bootcamp by Dr. Angela Yu is a 59.5-hour high-rated course. It teaches you how to code using Swift 5.1 and build beautiful iOS 13 apps for iPhone and iPad. Even if you have ZERO programming experience.
If you're looking for free online resources, we suggest here over 70 coding resources. They will help you get started learning to code on a budget.
Thanks so much for reading and hope to see you in another article.
