Apache Cordova 3 Programming

Posted: September 17, 2013 | | Categories: Mobile Development

Last week I put the finishing touches on Apache Cordova 3 Programming, my 4th book. The Cordova team recently released version 3 of the popular open source mobile development framework and this should be the first book on the topic.

The book is essentially a rewrite of the first half of PhoneGap Essentials. The Cordova tooling changed dramatically after PhoneGap Essentials was published, so the first half of that older book was pretty out of date. The first chapter is essentially the same, while the rest of the book focuses primarily on the tooling, but the last 100 pages cover the Cordova APIs, creating plugins and the end to end development process. It's complete coverage of the topic, but simply doesn't go into the APIs in as much detail as PhoneGap Essentials did.

In PhoneGap Essentials I wrote in detail about all of the supported mobile device platforms, but in this book, I focused only on Android, BlackBerry 10, iOS and Windows Phone 8. Additionally, PhoneGap Essentials didn't contain anything about PhoneGap or Cordova plugins, so in this edition I added a chapter where I create two plugins, one which is JavaScript only (for educational purposes) and another which is a native plugin for Android and iOS.

I'm pretty excited about the book; it's about 300 pages and should be out in electronic version pretty soon and available as a printed book before Christmas. I will post an update on the site as soon as it's available from my publisher at www.informit.com and amazon.com. Right now the book's web site is not operational, but I will fix that by the end of the week.

I really want to do an update on the second half of PhoneGap Essentials, so I'm having a discussion with my publisher about that as well. Stay tuned, I'll let you know how this progresses.

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