ServiceNow Development Handbook - Second Edition: A compendium of ServiceNow ITSM development pro-tips, guidelines, and…

Servicenow is exploding. With two major releases per year and a truckload of new features and technology changes with each. Luckily, there is an active online community of experts helping each other and welcoming new developers into the mix.Tim Woodruff is the most accomplished book-writer of that community. He has a heart to deliver the simple truths, the established wisdom of the experts into the hands of every beginner and intermediate Servicenow developer.Servicenow has become a vast development platform and there are multiple ways you can attempt to accomplish any task. This means there are also costly, time-consuming mistakes you can make. In this concise Handbook you will only find the specific tips and examples to help you understand the BEST way. The proper conventions to follow and approaches to take with coding on the modern Servicenow versions, and the reasons why. These short, clear examples and explanations will teach you "only what you need to know."

I bought the second edition of the ServiceNow Development Handbook thinking it would be a "part 2" of the original, but it is mostly just the same book with additional chapters. I found that this new edition has reorganized the book as well as added what looks like 30 pages. There are more issues in this book (2.0), though, like page breaks and table of contents numbering, which didn't appear in the original (1.4 for me). There are also some errors in both editions that only stand out if you're really analyzing the text (see "Extending OOB Script Includes" section about half-way through).This book is really good for ServiceNow devs of all levels to read and follow. Look past the issues with the formatting and you'll surely learn a lot.

I have Tim's other book and like the content in both; however, the form factor of the paperback is not good for lengthy lines of code. The line wrapping messes up the indentation and makes it more difficult to read.

Awesome

The first version of this book has been on my desk at work since the day it was released. I have been teaching a colleague ServiceNow development and this guide has been amazing in helping me to explain the development process and show with real life examples what I (and my trainee) should be doing when developing inside the platform. The second version has added a lot of info surrounding scripting performance, coding guidelines, and efficient methods of testing your scripts. As someone with very little Service Portal experience, this book also provides a lot of handy information about SP and helps me to at least look like I have a clue about SP.Overall, this is the best quick and condensed coding guide for ServiceNow I have ever read, and Mr. Woodruff has a great way of writing that is very technical while being extremely easy to read.

The ServiceNow Development Handbook 2nd Edition is now out and it's good. It has everything the first one had, and then some--including an entire section dedicated to the Service Portal, widgets, and scripts. It also contains an additional (much needed) section on logging, and ACLs. As mentioned, this handbook is aimed at ServiceNow developers and admins that don't care to sift through a 300-page book that's mostly filled with beginner level concepts. Rather, it's a no-nonsense guide packed to the gills with information you'll use on a daily basis. And since it's a handbook, it's easy to find the contents you need rather than trying to flip through a book the size of War and Peace.It gets down to the nuts and bolts of when to use a constructor versus creating a number of functions that do pretty much the same thing, but on different tables. Or, when it's best to use getters and setters in your code, or what to do when faced with the possibility of having to change out-of-box code. The author also discusses field level security, and when it's best to utilize ACLs and business rules over client-side scripting, or how to utilize AJAX and display business rules, and the differences between how calculated fields and default value fields work behind scenes. These are just a few of the many topics discussed in the book. And the author backs them up with several example scripts to visually show how one method works over the other.In addition, there's also a section on coding guidelines where the author explains efficiency and consistency, and provides examples of how to write code that not only saves you time, but is also easy to understand when other developers come across it. And, one important facet that the author wants the reader to understand is DRY code (Don't Repeat Yourself). Write code that can be reusable rather than specific blocks of code that can only be used in an instance or two.This is an important book for anyone working in a ServiceNow instance as a developer or admin, and is interested in just "getting" better.

As always, the author knows what he's talking about and to our benefit, has decided to release another book.This copy is packed with information that every Service Now Developer should know, from the ground up.I look forward to seeing what he puts out next!

Loved this! Way more content and well written! Tim is a fantastic teacher, and VERY knowledgeable in this skill.

A fantastic book by Tim, aka The Professor! :)