Force.com development blueprints

If you need a step by step guide to creating some demo apps this may be the book for you. I was looking for a book to give me some in depth knowledge on whether I wanted to learn SalesForce and the various components Force.com, VisualForce, Apex etc. as a potential new career path as a developer. In my opinion this book is geared toward end users wanting to dig a little deeper. It is not geared towards developers.

Recently, I was fortunate to attend a hackathon in Los Angeles sponsored by Salesforce, which makes the Force.com code described by this book. The company has several texts for Force documentation, which were indeed useful during the hackathon. But it would have been helpful to have had this book as an accompanying aid. It explains at a more readable level. And simply having more examples available can help some programmers.The text starts off with a very cogent topic. The use of Heroku. This website was bought by Salesforce in 2010. It is heavily used by programmers in java, Ruby on Rails, python and node.js, as well as for other languages. As a practical reality, if you aspire to be a professional programmer, the book's examples of using heroku plus the git version control program are good background. Many now put their source code in heroku and access via git. If you have to pick up just one thing from this book, read carefully about heroku and git and try to use those lessons.Also, the book uses extensive examples in Ruby on Rails, which has emerged as a major web server platform. If you can, take the book's advice and use Ruby on Ubuntu, as the Microsoft Windows environment has had awkward problems. Granted, maybe by the time you read this, those issues have been resolved.Not surprisingly, the book describes an example of CRM, which is essentially where Salesforce originated. The Force framework has abilities to let you rapidly add commonly needed features like 'chatter', which is just what Force calls an internal messaging for your users. The graphics widgets available under Force let you easily instantiate these as needed in your code.

This is a very good book, but one you'll want to invest some time working through it. Its suitable for beginners at the outset, but then become more appropriate for intermediate and advanced developers, so you could keep coming back to it as your experience increases. The technologies and application complexity ramp up sharply in the later chapters so its important to ensure that you have a grounding in the basics in order to understand exactly how the applications work. It will be well worth the effort though, and the experience gained will stand you in good stead in the future.