I’m probably the last one to comment about this book, but I guess that is better to do it late than never. As you may already know, a fellow Dynamics CRM MVP David Yack has recently published a book called “CRM as a Rapid Development Platform” which is a very comprehensive work about development for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
My first contact with this book was on June this year when David asked for help on reviewing the book to all the Dynamics CRM MVPs. The answer from the MVPs was amazing as David recognizes in his book, and in a less than an hour all the guys offered to help reviewing chapters of the book (I must talk one day about this fantastic group of professionals, I am really proud to have the opportunity of being part of it). I offered myself to review some chapters dedicated to Plug-ins since I had been working a lot with them and I was very interested on see how David presented this subject on his book.
The first impression couldn’t be better. Those chapters were really really comprehensive on how to work with Plug-ins and they deeply covered all the topics that anyone could expect from a development point of view. I had the pleasure of add my two cents with some minor advices and comments that finally got published on the book like the other Dynamics CRM MVPs did as well.
As soon as the Book was published, David and Julie gave us access to a electronic version of the book for free and a very especial price for the paperback version. I rushed to download some chapters that I was very interested to read, and my opinion of the book become even better. It didn’t took me more than half an hour to go to the book’s web site and order two copies for myself. Yes two, I wanted one to leave at the office and another one to have at home as I’m to lazy to carry such a big book in my rucksack. I forgot to mention that the book is more than 600 pages long!
Well, let me try to give you a more formal opinion about the book and who should read it. This book is definitely the most comprehensive work till the date about development on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform, it deeply covers all the topics related with it ranging from Scripting for the UI with JavaScript to Advice on packaging and deployment of ISV solutions and including of course all the other topics related with Plug-ins, Workflows, and even CRM Online. You can take a look to “The CRM Book” TOC here to find a complete list of chapters.
The book is mainly designed for developers, technical consultants, and solution architects working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM but it goes further than the pure development book and it always keeps the idea on how to take the advantage of Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Development Platform. So, you can expect to get very valuable advices covering interest topics like setting up environments for development teams, debugging and testing, performance and packaging you solutions for easy deployment.
That is not all, the book comes with a lot of very useful code libraries and examples ready to use on your solutions that can help you to speed up your solution development. There are libraries to help on plug-in development and debugging, an amazing library to accelerate the development with JavaScript and the CRM Web Services and lots of useful stuff.
So, If you have .Net development knowledge and some exposure to Dynamics CRM Development definitely this book is a must in your desk… and not, I am not getting any money for saying all of this, this post is really my humble opinion about the book.
Regards,
Marco Amoedo