I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of the fifth 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 over 60 pages longer than the previous edition – but that alone does not convey the scope of the changes.

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

Chapter 3: New coverage of the Salesforce platform cache and query selectivity limits.

Chapter 4: Extended to include additional bulk design patterns in the context of enforcing data integrity and addressing data skew.

Chapter 6: This chapter has been completely rewritten with all new examples to incorporate new technologies and modern approaches for refactoring application functionality into decoupled applications or packages.

Chapter 7: The chapter and examples have been rewritten to address batch apex exception events and queueable transaction finalizers. Other new topics include the challenge of dealing with transactions in the context of callouts, suicide scheduling and change data capture.

Chapter 9: The section on working with custom metadata has been completely rewritten to reflect improvements in the technology. The Aura sample code has been reimplemented as Lightning web components.

Chapter 10: The chapter and examples have been updated to be based on the new trigger examples in chapter 6.

Chapter 12: Revised recommendations for unit tests and managed packages.

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. Especially when it comes to trigger design patterns!

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 🙂