I was recently invited to be a technical reviewer of a book written specifically to help people study for the Salesforce.com Certified Force.com Developer exam. It’s written by Siddhesh Kabe who writes the May the Force be with you blog.

The book is called Force.com Developer Certification Handbook (DEV401) and is now available through Amazon in both paper and Kindle versions, online via Safari (read some of it online!) and also from the publisher themselves, Packt, in both dead tree and electronic formats.

Fellow technical reviewers include Matthew Botos (he’s also a great photographer!) and Ankit Arora who write the ForceGuru blog, both of whom were recently appointed Force.com MVPs.

Here’s an overview of the book:

CHAPTER 1, Getting Started with Force.com, gives an overview of Force.com concepts and leads the reader through set-up of a free Developer Account.

CHAPTER 2, Creating a Database on Force.com, shows how to create objects and relationships within the Force.com data model.

CHAPTER 3, User Interface, explains how to create tabs, pages, page layouts and Visualforce elements. There’s a lot of knowledge crammed into this chapter, so don’t expect to understand it all at once.

CHAPTER 4, Implementing Business Logic, covers validation rules, formulas, roll-up summaries, workflow and approval processes in pretty good detail.

CHAPTER 5, Data Management, looks at inter-object relationships and the Data Loader, used for importing and exporting data.

CHAPTER 6, Analytic and Reporting, shows how to create Reports and Dashboards.

CHAPTER 7, Application Administration, explains access rights, roles, profiles and passwords.

CHAPTER 8 contains a 66-question practice exam, with solutions.

If you’re looking for good Force.com books, also see my review of Jason Ouellette’s book, which has now come out with an updated 2nd Edition.

The Bottom Line

• It’s a new book to help with certification
• Just reading the book isn’t enough to pass   you also need real-world hands-on experience
• Have a brief read of it online