Author/s : Jason Ouellette
Publisher : Addison-Wesley
Category :
Other
Review by : Amit Ghorpade
Rating : 9 horseshoes
Development with the Force.com Platform is a good start point for developers looking at Force.com as a PaaS option. The chapter layout is the first striking feature. Its arranged in the same way as you think when developing an application. Starting at the backend followed by business logic and proceeding to UI and integration. This layout itself helps a lot in understanding the PaaS architecture at Force.com. As the book covers almost everything about Force.com PaaS, it is not in depth explanation of most of the things.
It is a beginner to intermediate book and introduces/ explains things to get you started, not to make you a pro on Force.com. As most of the concepts are either self-explanatory or do-it-yourself, they are discussed only on the superficial level. Similarly you will need to look for other resources to get more info on SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language), SOSL(Salesforce Object Search Language) and Apex. Intermediate to advanced users will find the chapters Advanced Integration and Advanced Platform Features quite interesting. Personally I liked the reports and dashboards feature overview, reports are really a pain all the time.
Putting it together I it is a really good book to start with Force.com with almost everything covered. However additional reading will be needed to get in-depth knowledge of actual programming, like Apex.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in
exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
More info at Amazon.com 
