I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of the fourth edition of Advanced Apex Programming!

I know what you’re thinking – what has changed? Do I really need a new edition?

Well, the first thing you should know, is that this book is about 20% larger than the previous edition. But, the price is the same – instead of increasing the page count, I was able to increase the page size – from 6 x 9 to 7.5 x 9.25.

And what’s in that 20%?

Here’s a brief summary of the major changes for this edition:

Chapter 2: The section on “Controlling Program Flow” has been largely rewritten with a new example.

Chapter 3: The sections on “CPU Time Limits”, “Benchmarking”, “24-hour Limits” and “Other Platform Limits” are new or have been rewritten.

Chapter 5: There’s a new discussion on detecting duplicate fields in dynamic SOQL queries.

Chapter 6: The trigger framework has been enhanced, with particular attention to handling record DML updates across multiple trigger handlers (a subject discussed in previous editions but not actually demonstrated).

Chapter 7: New coverage of platform events.

Chapter 9 is a completely new topic: Application configuration. The previous chapters 9-12 are now chapter 10-13 and the following paragraphs refer to them by their new chapter number.

Chapter 10: Additional discussion of platform events.

Chapter 11: Revised recommendations for unit tests and managed packages.

Chapter 13: Updated for Salesforce DX

So even if you don’t buy this new edition, please don’t read the previous one – the platform has changed, and many of the earlier recommendations no longer reflect best practices.

And by the way – the Kindle edition is still priced considerably lower than the print edition – so that offers an inexpensive way to check out what’s new without buying a new printed book, for those of you who are more cost sensitive (I do recommend the printed book in general though, as listings just don’t come through that well in the eBook editions).

As always, watch for corrections and updates here on advancedapex.com – as I’m quite sure Salesforce will continue to update the platform faster than I can revise the book 🙂