Programming the Mobile Web, 2nd Edition

Preface

In your pocket is a device that has changed the lives of billions of people all over the world. The third personal screen (after the TV and the computer) is the most personal one, and bringing our services to it is one of the key business priorities of this decade.

Mobile development, however, is a more challenging activity than desktop development. Platforms are severely fragmented, and developers have to work with minimal resources. Fortunately, the mobile web makes it easier to deal with this fragmentation, allowing developers to create applications that run on many more platforms than native (or installable) applications. As we will see later, the mobile web and installable applications are not enemies. In fact, they work together very well.

All of that sounds great: billions of devices, web technologies, multiplatform solutions... where’s the problem? More than half of your desktop web skills and the tips, hacks, and best practices you already know simply do not apply on the mobile web. The mobile web demands new usability patterns, new programming best practices, and new knowledge and abilities.

This is a second edition, prepared two years after the first one. At the time of the first edition there were almost no books, websites, or training courses focused on concrete mobile web programming. Today it’s more common to find such information; however, it’s not always good enough. We don’t need vague information like “this may not work on some phones”; we need real, fresh, ...