Salesforce Handbook Now Available for Kindle

The Kindle version of the Salesforce Handbook is now available! It took us a couple of attempts to get it done properly but we did it.

It’s available at Amazon and Amazon UK for your viewing pleasure.

Enjoy!

And we’re published!

After what seems like months of epic battles with the publishers we have been triumphant! The Salesforce Handbook is now available on Lulu.com and will be pushed to retailers such as Amazon and Google Books in the next few weeks.

On the site you’ll find both a paperback and electronic copy of the book and we’ve set the pricing such that we’re never likely to break even – but hey, a handshake and a kind word are good enough for those of our ilk.

Once again we’d like to thank all the reviewers, domain-experts and friends who’ve helped us along the journey that is writing a book. It was a massive learning experience and Jeff and I are better men for it. Merry Christmas, and hope you enjoy the book!

Buy the Salesforce Handbook!

What formats should we publish in?

We’re well on our way to publishing the Salesforce Handbook in the traditional, hardcopy (read old-skool) format but were wondering how much interest there might be in other formats. Here’s your chance to let us know!

Salesforce Handbook v0.1

We’ve been writing up a storm between Jeff and I and are targeting the end of this month for the end of our first draft. Don’t get too excited just yet (a little excitement is certainly allowed though) as after all this furious writing will (undoubtebly) come a lot of furious editing. Timelines put us at the publishers mid-Octoberish and then you’ll be able to get the Salesforce Handbook hot off the presses.

To whet your appetite here’s an excerpt from one of the draft chapters:

The Right Tool for the Right Job

Now that you’re equipped with an overview of how your cloud-based development network might be organized it is important that you learn:

• Which Force.com developer tools exist
• When it is appropriate to use specific tools
• How to use these tools

In this section I will discuss everything you need to create, test and deploy your Force.com code whilst being mindful of the above points. I will also touch on desktop applications or areas of Force.com that you’ll need when analyzing and monitoring your code, as well as the various support options available to you.

Certain tools overlap several development tasks, and some development tasks overlap each other. It’s for this reason that the first two points are so important when discussing development toolsets.

Developing Applications on the Force.com Platform

Creating code in any modern language is usually done through an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that offers a number of advantages over coding through a text-editor or something equally archaic. By the end of this section you’ll know which IDEs Force.com offers and when to use each of them.

Force.com App Builder Tools

Salesforce has created one of the best browser-based IDEs in the world and it delivers most, if not all, of the core functionality you’d expect from a desktop-based equivalent. There are two ways to access the IDE, each of which presents a slightly different experience.

The first way involves clicking Setup > Develop as a logged in user. From there you have access to each Force.com area of development, namely:

• Apex Classes
• Apex Triggers
• Components
• Pages
• S-Controls

Don’t forget to submit your favourite AppExchange Apps for a chance for them to appear the book. Ciao for now!

Community Blogs about Salesforce.com and the Force.com platform

A number of Salesforce and Force.com community members find it fulfilling to share their experiences and neat tricks with us via the blogosphere. Some of you may not be aware of all the excellent blogs out there so I’d like to post a list of the few that I frequent. In no particular order:

• http://force201.wordpress.com/
• http://www.tgerm.com/
• http://www.tehnrd.com/
• http://richardvanhook.com/
• http://blog.jeffdouglas.com/
• http://th3silverlining.com/
• http://gokubi.com/
• http://sfdc.arrowpointe.com/
• http://www.forcedotcom.com/
• http://salesforce.phollaio.com/
• http://salesforcesource.blogspot.com/
• http://theenforcer.net/
• http://blog.sforce.com/
• http://codinginthecloud.com
• http://crmfyi.com
• http://www.embracingthecloud.com
• http://forcecertified.com

I’d suggest bookmarking them all as each has it’s own pearls of wisdom no matter what area of Salesforce and the Force.com platform you work with. If you have any other contributions please post them in the comments.

Communication is Key

More than a few people have asked “How will I know when the book is published?” and since the internet is all about communication, we thought we’d broadcast announcements through some of our favourite channels:

• Twitter

• Through RSS feeds and email subscriptions to this blog

• Google Buzz (salesforcehandbook@gmail.com)

• The Salesforce Discussion Boards

If there are any other channels that you frequent and would like us to include, let us know and we’ll try to accommodate you.

Announcing the Salesforce Handbook

Wes Nolte and I have been blogging for quite sometime and we see a need in the Force.com community. We’ve been blogging lately about advanced topics (jQuery, Twitter, Adobe Air, etc.) but the majority of our traffic is for what you might call our “beginning” topics. Also, if you browse the Salesforce message boards you’ll see that a majority of the questions center around “getting started” (e.g., how do I write this trigger, what is a unit test, how do I make a Visualforce page redirect…).

Salesforce has some great articles at developer.force.com and the Force.com community has chipped in with some excellent content but there is still something missing.  There’s a beginning book for Salesforce users (Salesforce.com for Dummies) and an advanced Force.com development book (Development with the Force.com Platform) but there is no comprehensive guide for analysts and developers just coming on to the platform. This is the niche that Wes and I want to fill with our new book:

The Salesforce Handbook
A newcomer’s guide to building applications on Salesforce.com and the Force.com Platform

We are targeting this book for business owners, analysts and developers  just getting started. Just think of all the new Vmforce Java developers that will be investigating the Force.com platform in the coming months! So if your boss walks into your office and says, “Let’s look at this Salesforce.com thing and see if we can build something”. We want this to be a reference that you can pick up and essentially find out everything you need to know about Salesforce from a high level with links to other articles, sample code, blogs, Salesforce docs, etc. that interest you.

We plan on writing on a wide array of topics and not delving too deeply into any one aspect. We’ll be publishing the table of contents shortly but we’ll be covering as much as possible including tools, declarative development, security, reporting, Apex, workflow, integration with external applications, data loading and much, much more.

We have been working on the book for a while now and hope to release it in the next 2-3 months. We are self-publishing it with Lulu and it will be available in paperback and digital versions. No idea about a price yet.

Drop us a line if you have any questions or comments.