Author: David Studebaker Publisher: PACKT ISBN: 978-1-847196-52-1 Published: November 2009

Available from the PACKT web site and Amazon.com

When I saw that David Studebaker had written a new book on Programming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, the first thing I wanted to know was whether this is a completely new book or a tarted-up version of his previous book which I reviewed in December 2007.

Now that I have finished reading it (and it’s a whopping 559 pages in 9 chapters) I can tell you that it’s a bit of both. There is a lot of new content in this book and the programming scenario that flows throughout the book has been completely redone and is, in my opinion, much improved. The whole book has a fresh new approach but I kept getting a sense of déjà lu. The ‘read it before’ feeling is not surprising: this is a re-write and if you open this book and the previous one side-by-side, you’ll see a lot of the content is fundamentally the same. That’s fair enough, there’s only so much you can write on the subject of programming NAV and the re-writing and corrections has improved the book greatly.

Each chapter finishes with a pop quiz with a number of carefully considered questions to help you determine whether you have grasped the basic concepts. The book is much easier to read than the previous version, and there are considerably less mistakes (I still managed to find a few although the majority were proofing errors rather than programming errors).

Sadly for me, the chapter on Forms has been re-written as a chapter on Pages which means this book is no longer a complete introduction to NAV programming and if you want to learn about creating Forms, we are told to buy the other book as well (or if you’re on a budget, you could consider reading the sample chapter of my book instead). There is no mention of Form transformation, which for me is a large part of NAV 2009 development. At the moment, the easiest way to develop and maintain NAV 2009 is to create Forms and use the Form Transformation tool to create the pages. This book is not going to help you do that, although you will get a good understanding of what pages are and what you can do with them. If you want some help with the more complex areas, such as Page Transformation, advanced Report Transformation or Matrix Pages, you should consider Rene Gayer’s book.

When I wrote my original review of Programming Microsoft Dynamics NAV two years ago, I said that this was the only book on programming NAV and that is reason enough to buy it. There are now two other books on NAV 2009, Rene’s book and the one I co-authored with Vjeko. There is Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Developer and IT Pro Documentation available online at msdn and there are now some amazing blogs that cover advanced topics such as creating Web service-consuming applications and RTC Client Add-ins, so the question remains, should you buy this book?

If you are new to programming NAV and have not read David’s previous book, then this is a great book for you and you will learn a lot from it. Definitely buy it.

If you have read David’s previous book and are now looking for a guide to what’s new in NAV 2009 you should probably consider other sources that will give you the overview of what’s new with a lot more new content (such as my book, Rene’s book or the online articles and blogs).

Postscript for the E-book Enthusiasts

As part of my review of this book, I wanted to try reading the e-book version so that I could compare that to the printed copy. Printed books still have a lot of advantages over e-books, although I think you should consider buying both if you can afford it. This gives you the ease and comfort of reading a paper book with the convenience of being able to search the contents for a specific topic. There are some good deals when buying both the e-book and the p-book from the Packt web site, although it’s a shame you don’t get the e-book for free when you buy the printed copy. I first tried reading the e-book using my Sony PRS-505 Reader http://www.sony.co.uk/hub/reader-ebook . This uses electronic ink to display the text which provides a close-to-paper reading experience. The PDF document format is not ideally suited to the PRS-505. The large white space borders mean the text is tiny even if you read it in split-page landscape mode. You can reflow the text to increase the text size but this spoils the layout. The book is also so large that re-flowing it locked my reader for over 20 minutes. Next I tried using GoodReader (http://www.goodreader.net/goodreader.html) on my Apple iPhone to read the book. This was great. GoodReader lets you zoom the display to get rid of the large borders and then lock the horizontal scroll making it easy to flick through the text. I actually read quite a bit of the book like this and I found the text clear and the images crisp. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you should seriously consider this as an option.