I've mentioned now multiple times that I'm a huge fan of "cookbook" style technical books. After I've learned the basics of a language, I love to see real, if small, examples of applications built in a language so I can get a feel for what it's like to actually develop with a particular platform. I was happy to get a review copy of what I believe is the first such book for the Ionic framework, Hoc Phan's "Ionic Cookbook."
It has over 250 pages of recipes covering a huge range of topics, demonstrating everything from different UI components of the Ionic framework to handling data storage for proper offline support. To be honest, much of what is covered in this book would be incredibly useful outside of Ionic as well. For example, the discussions on Firebase would be useful in a vanilla Cordova application.
Typically a "cookbook" style book assumes you know the platform already, but this book spends time at the beginning introducing you to the basics of Ionic as well, so it would actually help someone who is new to Ionic as well. (Although I'd try to have some basic Cordova knowledge first.) At the end, Hoc even discusses how to publish your apps to the app stores, which is yet again a topic that will be useful to folks using Ionic or some other UI/UX platform.
While reading, I did find a few things I thought were done wrong, but honestly, those were more "I'd do it this way" type things than real disagreements. Even better, I learned a few things as well. I definitely recommend picking it up!
In case you're curious, here is the table of contents:
- CREATING OUR FIRST APP WITH IONIC
- MANAGING STATES AND NAVIGATION
- ADDING DEVICE FEATURES SUPPORT
- OFFLINE DATA STORAGE
- HANDLING GESTURES AND EVENTS
- APP THEME CUSTOMIZATION
- EXTENDING IONIC WITH YOUR OWN COMPONENTS
- USER REGISTRATION AND AUTHENTICATION
- SAVING AND LOADING DATA USING FIREBASE
- FINALIZING YOUR APPS FOR DIFFERENT PLATFORMS