Friday 17 January 2014

Book Review - Visualforce Developer's Guide

9818EN Cover

(Disclaimer: I didn’t purchase this book - I was sent an e-copy to review by Packt Publishing).

Book reviews are like buses - you wait for ages and then two come along at once. (This is a well-worn British joke about the unreliability of public transport - if you live in a country where public transport is efficient, please ignore this).

The Visualforce Developer’s Guide covers a number of topics from getting started through to security best practice via controllers and custom components, among others. including an unexpected (for me at least) chapter on using Visualforce in the Salesforce mobile (now classic) applications for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. While these are in maintenance only mode, they are still the best Salesforce mobile solutions for offline access to data and the only installed application options for windows mobile and blackberry.

While there is a lot of useful information in this book, my main criticism is around the introduction of each new technology.  In the main it is just dropped on the reader without much explanation of why its a good idea to use it. If I were new to something like the JQuery JavaScript framework, for example, I’d want to understand why I should be using that as opposed to vanilla JavaScript - and as I’m not new to JQuery I know there are a number of good reasons.

This is a good book, but it could have been great with a little more emphasis on educating the reader rather than just showing them the mechanics.

You can purchase the book at:

http://www.packtpub.com/visualforce-developers-guide/book?utm_source=mention.com&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=book_mention.com

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