As I headed out from Dreamforce, one of my last stops was the developer library where I saw Andrew Fawcett signing his new book, “Force.com Enterprise Architecture”. It took me a while to get around to reading it, and I thought I’d share a few comments since he was kind enough to give me a copy.
As I discuss in my Pluralsight course “Learning Technology in the Information Age”, I feel that books provide a unique value proposition – along with taking a course, they are the best way to gain domain knowledge that is curated and organized in a way that is easy to learn. So that’s how I measure the value of a book beyond the obvious standards of clarity and accuracy – by choice of content and organization.
The first thing you should know is that this is not a book for beginners. This is not the book for an admin to read who wants to learn Apex. It’s also not the book to read if your goal is to obtain one of the innumerable certifications that Salesforce offers. This book is intended for intermediate to expert level Force.com developers.
The title, “Force.com Enterprise Architecture” is a rather generic title that is accurate enough, but as you will see, tends to obscure the real value of the book. This is a good book for any Force.com developer who wants to learn to how to architect solutions on the platform. The exact approaches in the book aren’t necessarily applicable or necessary for every solution, but they demonstrate the right way to think about architecture on the platform.
That said, if you are a developer who is thinking about creating a managed package or application to distribute on the AppExchange, this book isn’t just good – it’s indispensable. It is a “drop everything you are doing and buy a copy for every member of your team before you do anything else” kind of book.
There are many books on Salesforce and Force.com, including many books published by Salesforce itself, but what almost all of them have in common is that they are written by in-house developers and consultants. As far as I know there are just two books in existence written by developers who have shipped major managed packages on the AppExchange and this is one of them (mine is the other). Andrew Fawcett is CTO at FinancialForce, and he may know more than anyone in the world on what it takes to ship a Force.com application (myself included) – so if you’re even thinking about doing that, you’d be a fool not to buy this book and study it carefully. It’s full of the kinds of hints, tricks and suggestions that you won’t find anywhere else (including the books published by Salesforce – most of their authors haven’t shipped managed packages either).
And it’s a great complement for Advanced Apex Programming – you’ll find there is little overlap between them.
