A few weeks ago, I saw a post on Twitter about Kevin Poorman releasing a new book about programming in Salesforce Apex and really mastering the development environment. Kevin Poorman’s “Mastering Application Development with Force.com” covers a lot of different parts of Salesforce’s Force.com platform that aren’t well covered elsewhere.
I guess there’s a few things to keep in mind when reading this review:
- I purchased the kindle edition before the paperback edition was available.
- I am not a newbie to Force.com and Apex Programming. I’ve been programming in Apex, and doing bits of Salesforce Admin work for a few years
- I’ve read Dan Appleman’s Advanced Apex (Second & Third Edtion), along with lots of blog articles, and other Salesforce books.
Like most books, the first chapter is about what Salesforce is, why it matters,and how to get a development org. I don’t remember there being anything particularly ground breaking or exciting during this chapter.
I’m very thankful that the second chapter doesn’t waste time explaining what standard objects are and what not; it instead moves into the developer’s console and shows how to use it, code coverage, etc. It’s no secret, that I’m not really a fan of the developer’s console and that I really only use it for executing SOQL and running Tests. For an alternative to the developer console, I recommend looking at the Welkin Suite.
The chapters on Asyncronous Apex are pretty well put together. Examples include code that might actually be found in most force.com organizations. I really liked that he included a chapter on a Trigger Framework. It’s rare that a development book actually have good examples. Along with providing pretty good examples, Kevin has actually tried to include some very pragmatic best practices along the way. It’s very refreshing to see code that is almost enterprise ready.
Kevin has put together a couple of excellent chapters on the new Lightning components along with an amazing chapter about testing and testing frameworks.
I really enjoyed “Mastering Application Development with Force.com” and highly recommend reading it before Advanced
