Practical Salesforce.com Development Without Code written by Phil Weinmeister has been recently released. I think the book really targets those new to the Salesforce platform and does a wonderful job of providing examples and providing a reference that will be useful in the future.

Phil Weinmeister has done a phenomenal job putting together some different scenarios where it makes absolute sense to make use of the declarative functionality that Salesforce provides. As a developer I’ve struggled quite a bit when to use “clicks not code” and feel that Phil has great examples that would be useful to most Salesforce Admins and developers to learn from.

Some of the topics covered include workflows, approvals, process builder, validation rules, and more.

The chapter on object and field level permissions in Salesforce is really well written. I really wish this book had existed when I was first starting to use Salesforce.

Overall, I recommend using the book to learn the declarative features of Salesforce.