Book Review: Visualforce Development Cookbook

Not a book for beginners, but GREAT for seasoned Apex developers

I recently had the honor of reviewing the recently published, Visualforce Development Cookbook. The code recipes are great and could really go far in demonstrating the potential of the platform. It is obvious that the author, Keir Bowden has implemented many, if not all of these recipes in real-world scenarios. However, I think this is a dangerous book for developers new to the Force.com platform. In fact, I would not recommend it to anyone who has not worked with the platform for at least one year.

While step by step instructions are provided, along with occasional notes about real-world considerations that should be made, the author does not go into detail about these considerations. For example, on page 36, the author advises readers to use a Utility class to handle creating the data, but does not go into how to actually do this.

Also, the author only provides test code for one of the recipes in the first chapter and then never mentions testing again. Anyone that has worked with the platform for a while knows that writing test code can sometimes take longer and be more difficult than writing the actual code. I could see someone new to the platform using this book to create many changes in their development org and get everyone excited about using the stuff and then never be able to get all the required unit test code together in order to deploy.

The sample code that was provided was easy to download and well organized. It was also formatted properly so that you could cut and paste it straight into your development org. Very little sample code is included in the actual book, which I think helps to ensure that the book stays up to date. As long as the publisher and author continue to update the sample code with each new Salesforce release, the code should stay viable as the platform inevitably changes.

I REALLY liked the chapters on JavaScript, Force.com Sites and Mobile Development and cannot wait to try out some of the recipes included for my clients. My favorite part of the whole book was the fact that the author utilized the Google Hosted Libraries Content Delivery Network rather than static resources for the jQuery code. This was a very smart move and helps to ensure that the code stays viable in the future and also makes use of the latest industry standards.

Some of my favorite Javascript recipes included the tooltips (which featured a slick slidedown effect), the collapsible list elements and the scrolling news ticker. This chapter really demonstrated to me the power of Visualforce and how you can use it to make some powerful and dynamic pages that are unique to your brand.

I really appreciated the final chapter on jQuery Mobile. In fact, if you read only one chapter in this book, read this one. As the author explains, the book is about Visualforce and not mobile development, so it focuses on using HTML5 and the jQuery Mobile Framework to provide the interface code. My favorite recipe in this chapter was the one on navigation and transitions. The author includes transition examples that pop, flip, turn, flow and slide the user from one page to the next. Sweet!!! I will warn you that the code did not display well on my iPhone, but I plan on looking into this further and if I find out the reason why, I will do a separate post about this.

I did find a few inevitable errors in the book as I worked through the code recipes, but the errors were minor and I got past most of them easily. I will report the ones I found to the publisher as errata.

In short, this is an invaluable resource for seasoned Force.com developers, but should be approached with caution for newbies. Force.com is a powerful platform. Much more powerful than most people give it credit for. While this book does include recipes that clearly demonstrate that power, I think experience is needed to help the reader apply the knowledge from this book in the best way possible.