7 Books to Become a Mobile Developer in 2023
Smartphones are ruling the world.
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.
Why Learn Mobile Development
Here are 5 solid reasons to learn mobile development and giving your career a jumpstart:
Booming job prospects: A lot of organizations have a dedicated team for mobile development with hiring catching pace. You have that skill, and companies will do anything to hire you.
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.
It’s among the fastest-growing technology: With Smartphones getting smarter, the scope of mobile development is sure to touch new heights.
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.
You can be an Independent Developer: You may easily become an independent developer by creating your own apps. The unique advantage of learning mobile development is that learners can choose to work or freelance.
What Makes the Best Books for Mobile Developers?
Here are our criteria for the selection of the books:
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.
The book should have a clear layout.
Best Books for Mobile Developers
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.
1. Best Book for Young Developers: Beginning App Development with Flutter: Create Cross-Platform Mobile Apps
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
Initiate async Ajax calls to RESTful APIs — including Google Firebase!
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:
Part 1: Introduction to Flutter
Chapter 1: Hello Flutter
Chapter 2: Developing in Flutter
Part 2: Foundational 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 9: Managing State
Part 3: Above and Beyond
Chapter 10: Your Flutter App Can Work with Files
Chapter 11: Making RESTful API Calls with HTTP
Chapter 12: Using Firebase with Flutter
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.
2. Best Book for Hands-On Learners: Native Mobile Development: A Cross-Reference for iOS and Android
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:
Part 1: Tasks and Operations
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 14 covers Testing
Part 2: Sample App
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
Chapter 20: Networking and Our App
This book is for any native programmer working either exclusively with a single platform or with both.
3. Best Book for Beginners: Learn Simply: Android Mobile Application Development using Kotlin
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.
The contents covered in the book are:
Kotlin Programming
Android and Kotlin
First Mobile Application
Layout Design
Views (Widgets)
Data-Driven Containers
Intents
Activity Life Cycle
RESTful Web API
Action Bar
SQLite Database
Cloud Database - Firebase
Localization
Location
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:
4. Best Book for Completionists: Learn Java for Android Development: Migrating Java SE Programming Skills to Mobile Development
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.
After reading the book, you will be able to:
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
Migrate your Java skills for the mobile development using the Android platform
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
Chapter 17 covers Date and Time
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.
5. Best Book for Web Developer Turned Mobile: React and React Native: A complete hands-on guide to modern web and mobile development with React.js
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.
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:
Delve into the React architecture, component properties, state, and context
Get to grips with React Hooks for handling functions and components
Implement code splitting in React using lazy components and Suspense
Build robust user interfaces for mobile and desktop apps using Material-UI
Write shared components for Android and iOS mobile apps using React Native
Simplify layout design for React Native apps using NativeBase
Write GraphQL schemas to power web and mobile apps
Implement web and mobile components that are driven by Apollo
The book is divided into twenty-eight chapters and includes the following topics:
Chapter 1: Why React?
Chapter 2: Rendering with JSX
Chapter 3: Component Properties, State, and Context
Chapter 4: Getting Started with Hooks
Chapter 5: Event Handling - The React Way
Chapter 6: Crafting Reusable Components
Chapter 7: The React Component Life Cycle
Chapter 8: Validating Component Properties
Chapter 9: Handling Navigation with Routes
Chapter 10: Code Splitting Using Lazy Components and Suspense
Chapter 11: Server-Side React Components
Chapter 12: User Interface Framework Components
Chapter 13: Why React Native?
Chapter 14: Kick-Starting React Native Projects
Chapter 15: Building Responsive Layouts with Flexbox
Chapter 16: Navigating Between Screens
Chapter 17: Rendering Item Lists
Chapter 18: Showing Progress
Chapter 19: Geolocation and Maps
Chapter 20: Collecting User Input
Chapter 21: Displaying Modal Screens
Chapter 22: Responding to User Gestures
Chapter 23: Controlling Image Display
Chapter 24: Going Offline
Chapter 25: Native UI Components Using NativeBase
Chapter 26: Handling Application State
Chapter 27: Why Apollo?
Chapter 28: Building an Apollo React App
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.
6. Best Book for iOS developers: iOS Development with Swift
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:
Part 1 - Introducing XCODE and Swift
Chapter 1: Your first iOS application
Chapter 2: Introduction to Swift playgrounds
Chapter 3: Swift objects
Part 2 - Building Your Interface
Chapter 4: View controllers, views, and outlets
Chapter 5: User interaction
Chapter 6: Adaptive layout
Chapter 7: More adaptive layout
Chapter 8: Keyboard notifications, animation, and scrolling
Part 3 - Building your APP
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 15: Debugging and testing
Part 4 - Finalizing your APP
Chapter 16: Distributing your app
Chapter 17: What's next?
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!
7. Best Book for Serious Learners: Mobile Applications Development: with Python in Kivy Framework
Mobile Applications Development: with Python in Kivy Framework by Kamal Kant Hiran, Ruchi Doshi, and Tarkeshwar Barua covers the concepts of Python programming language along with mobile application development. Starting from fundamentals, the book continues with the explanation of mobile app development using the Kivy framework.
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
Chapter 13 includes sample projects
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.
More Ways to Learn About Mobile Development
The books for mobile developers featured in this post will help anyone looking to gain insight into the growing field.
Going with the current trend, taking an online course from the comfort of your home is a great and convenient way to pitch into this smokey hot 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
Course 5: Capstone MOOC for "Android App Development"
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.
Codecademy: Build Basic Android Apps with Java skill pat will help you to build a basic Android app from start to finish. It includes Java, XML, Android Studio, Wireframing, Layout Editor, Material Design, and more. For more on Codecademy Pro, see my Codecademy Pro review.
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.
