Foreword

This book is the result of several months of dedicated work by Arvind Ravulavaru, a dedicated developer and writer, with whom I've had the pleasure of collaborating on several occasions. This book provides a great way to get started with Ionic and provides detailed examples from which even experienced developers can learn.

Arvind takes you through the process of installing everything you need to get started with Ionic. He also shows you how to set up native SDKs. Further, Arvind covers the basics of Ionic, such as Ionic's components, navigation using the UI-router, custom styles, and the APIs provided by Ionic. Thus, readers can build two apps: a bookstore app and a real-time chat application.

For experienced developers, the book explains how to enable native device APIs through Cordova's plugins. You'll learn how to use ngCordova (another project by the Ionic team) and Cordova plugins in an AngularJS syntax. In the chat application, you'll see how to connect to external databases, such as Firebase. You will also see how to keep your data in sync with all devices.

Prior to joining Ionic as a core team member and a developer advocate, I worked for another company, where I created many internal hybrid apps. After evaluating other frameworks, I chose Ionic because it offered the only complete solution for hybrid mobile development. Everything I needed to get going was provided by Ionic. Instead of focusing on how to architect my app, I could focus on just building the app.

Ionic offers a complete ecosystem for hybrid mobile app development, saves costs, and offers a high-performance, beautiful alternative to native development. We released the stable version of Ionic in May and then released alpha versions of three of our platform services this summer. We don't have any plans to slow down; our support for the open source Ionic SDK will always remain strong. At Ionic, I worked with experienced and new developers, traveled all over the world to teach newbies, and researched code with Ionic pros. I'm constantly impressed with how much people love the product and with what a dynamic and positive community we have.

You'll find this book to be a great introduction to Ionic. It will give you a chance to learn some more about the SDK. Thank you for being part of the Ionic community.

Enjoy!

Mike Hartington

Core Team Member, Ionic