What you need for this book

In order to follow along with the code throughout this book, you will need to have Xamarin installed on your machine. The Xamarin installer will take care of installing any SDK prerequisites and will also install Xamarin Studio. Although the examples throughout this book are shown in Xamarin Studio on a Mac, everything shown can also be done in Visual Studio on a Windows machine. If you are using a Windows machine, you will need a Mac running Xamarin on your network to serve as a build host to build and debug iOS apps. For details on setting up a Xamarin build host on a Mac or any other requirement to set up a Xamarin development environment, visit http://developer.xamarin.com/.

In Chapter 6, API Data Access, you will need a Microsoft Azure account in order to follow along with the examples to create a basic API.

Throughout this book, there are several tools and libraries used which are obtained from NuGet and/or Xamarin's Component Store.