Preface

The world of a mobile app developer is getting more and more complicated. The technology is not standing still. Every day, new versions of mobile operating systems are released to the market. Mobile devices are getting new capabilities. User expectations are constantly growing, and it is becoming increasingly harder to meet them.

The only way to meet and exceed all challenges in the contemporary world of mobile development is to become a developer superhero! Super heroes have super tools. In this book, we are going to embark on the journey of mastering Delphi development. We will learn how to gain amazing productivity powers and rapidly build stunning cross-platform mobile apps from one codebase.

We will start with getting comfortable with using the Delphi IDE. Then, we will review the key constructs of the Object Pascal language and everyday programmer tasks, so you can easily understand and write solid and maintainable source code. Over the course of this book, the fun levels are only going to increase. We will start our adventure with mobile development with Delphi from building small projects that will make you feel like a real Delphi developer. Having mastered simple things, you will be ready for doing more serious stuff. We will go deep into understanding the concept of FireMonkey styles, which is the cornerstone of building stunning cross-platform user interfaces that will make the difference in the end user experience of your apps. The rest of the journey is all about gaining practical knowledge of using more complex Delphi frameworks. We will get down to the metal and harness the full power of mobile hardware and operating systems. We will be working with sensors, extending to the Internet of Things, building data-driven user interfaces, embedding mobile databases, integrating with REST web services, architecting scalable, multiuser backends, and more.

This book is packed with practical code examples and best practices for you to become an excellent mobile developer!