Force.com Developer Certification Handbook (DEV401)

I would prefer to rate this 2.5 stars if possible, but I'll lean on the 3 star side because, admittedly so, I can credit this book with helping me pass the DEV 401 exam and saving me $1000s from having to take training courses direct through Salesforce. I would NOT recommend this book for beginners or users without any Salesforce administrative experience.I had been a Salesforce administrator for 2+ years and working on custom development, including writing Apex triggers and classes in tandem with Visualforce pages, for over a year when I decided to take the test. Needless to say, I was a bit cocky believing that I could pass the test based on my self-taught experience alone. While taking the test, there were questions on content that were almost foreign to me, and it was abundantly clear that I did not possess the necessary knowledge to pass. After having not passed, I purchased the kindle edition of this book. While the book does have some glaring typos and misspellings, and sometimes hard to understand sentences, it did provide the necessary information to fill in the gaps where my knowledge was lacking and help me pass on my second attempt. I have read that in other reviews that the end of chapter questions were often inconsistent with the sample exam question set at the end of the book, but I actually did find them somewhat useful. Many of the end-of-chapter questions are structured very similarly to actual exam questions. I do feel this book helped pushed me over the hump in order to pass the exam.In summary, I would recommend this book to anyone has had basic Salesforce administrator or developer experience looking to obtain the Certified Developer certification.

If you are looking to become a Force.com developer it is a good buy but you will never make a living doing that in the USA when India has so many developers who charge next to nothing.

This book has lots of problems. Language-wise it has some crooked sentences obviously coming from a non native English speaking author. Each of the chapters close with a series of multiple choice exam preparation questions. Salesforce exams sometimes allow multiple correct answers, but always state exactly how many correct answers there are. This book does not (always). The questions are not phrased as sharply as in the actual Salesforce exam, leaving you with lots of unnecessary question marks. Who is the "user"? Or do you mean the "developer"? I am even convinced that some of the answers are plain wrong. The answers to questions are often not covered by the content of the chapters (?!).Why so many exam prep questions on the topic of encrypted fields? My actual exam had none!The book does not always seem to be updated towards the latest Salesforce version (currently Summer '15).There is one chapter that is solely targeted toward exam prep. However the multiple choice questions in this chapter are mostly copies of the questions in the previous chapters.Did this book help me passing the exam? Strangely it did. Why? Salesforce itself provides an enormous amount of documentation, making it very difficult to pinpoint the exact stuff that you need to master for the DEV401 exam. There is genuine risk that you study way too many topics. This book matches exactly the exam topics, therefore it puts focus on your study effort.

I bought this book in preparation for taking the Dev401 exam. I found it logical, informative and credit it with having just passed the exam. I had other resources I used - multiple sets of sample questions - but this book was by far the best resource. I will continue to use it as a reference. Thanks to the author! I highly recommend this book if you want to pass Dev401.

... like dragging your eyes through broken glass. This quite possibly combined the worst of technical training manuals and how-to guides, while failing to be either.As has already been mentioned, the editing is terrible. Misplaced punctuation, missing letters in words, and inconsistent image sizes make this a difficult read at best. I can only hope the print version did the material more justice than the Kindle version. It all comes to a climax of the answer key for the practice exam being wrong; question 46 has two answers, not one as listed in the key, which gets the matching number of 66 questions/answers (the key has 67 answers).At some point in the book's evolution, there was the idea of taking the reader on a tour of the product. That's all well and fine if your revisions take this into account, but it didn't happen here. The introduction of new features covered in an "also, while you're on this screen" fashion leave a jarring, disjointed experience that doesn't do the reader any favors. Adding to the issues, the examples pick up with steps that have obviously been skipped, forcing the reader to make a best guess at how some screenshots were achieved.In short, this is neither reference material or training documentation. Furthermore, with the release of the Winter '13 version of SalesForce, this work has already become partially obsolete, and there are glaring holes in the features covered.

I recommend this book to anyone preparing for the Salesforce Developer Certification Exam. It is also a great book if you want to understand how to build an application in Salesforce.

good to have

Great book to learn force.com

I bought this book to get an overview about Salesforce and it is realy useful for someone, who has not so much experience with SF and will study for the exam.The chapters are easy to read and to understand. The exercises are useful to learn how SF works and where you can find all the settings.I recommend this book to everyone, who starts with SF!