Jason has recently released a book dedicated to Force.com Development. It’s called Development with the Force.com Platform: Building Business Applications in the Cloud and, aside from having the world’s longest title, is also the world’s first book on Force.com (that wasn’t written by Salesforce).

Jason’s Force.com Book

The book covers practically every topic relating to Force.com which is, as you probably know, an awful lot of information! As such, having only 400 pages, the book is more of an introductory tutorial than a reference book. Indeed, Jason fully admits that people will still need to refer to the standard PDFs to get detailed technical information.

So, who is the book good for? Definitely for anyone having to code Force.com who is relatively new to Salesforce and Force.com. It mentions all the technologies available in Force.com, so is vital for people wanting to come to grips with the platform.

If you’re a developer already using Force.com and you’ve used the Salesforce platform for 2+ years, then this book isn’t going to teach you anything new. However, it is rare that a developer has played with every feature in Force.com (eg I’ve never played with approvals, Salesforce-to-Salesforce, DML rollbacks, Visualforce JavaScript actions), so the book can even teach old dogs a trick or two.

For further insight into the book, see my review on Amazon.com.

Now for a real treat. While at Dreamforce, I managed to snag an interview with Jason, so here he is talking about his own book:

Thanks for the interview, Jason!

The Bottom Line

• Force.com now has its first book!
• It’s great for people new to Force.com, might not be so helpful to already-experienced Force.com developers
• Jason Ouellette’s a really nice guy!

Fresh from Dreamforce, I just had the pleasure of meeting David Schach, better known for writing the X-Squared on Demand blog .

The Enforcer (left) & David Schach (right)

David showed me some of the stuff he has been doing with Visualforce, which made me quite jealous. Take a look at his recent blog post of his Upcoming Plans to see what’s keeping him excited. (Oh, and thanks for the link to drop.io — very nice!).

The Bottom Line

• The world’s a small place