ServiceNow Development Handbook: A Compendium of Guidelines and Best Practices for ServiceNow Developers

by Tim Woodruff

The second edition of this book is now available! We strongly recommend getting the second edition, which you can find on Amazon at the The goal of this book is to cover the standards and best-practices that most ServiceNow developers either learn the hard way, or never learn at the things that every developer wishes they knew from day one, and which - once learned - will make you a more effective and efficient developer. Do your future self a favor, and read this book! Having an understanding of why a given standard is what it is (and why it’s important), will not only make you more likely to adhere to it, but will empower you to apply the logic and underlying concepts to other areas. It'll make you a more effective administrator, developer, or architect. That’s that spirit in which this compendium was A spirit of teaching and explaining, not simply listing out a series of edicts under the heading of “best-practice”. This is a condensed “developer guide”, not a complete ServiceNow training course in book-form. It assumes that you’ve already become at least somewhat familiar with the ServiceNow platform, and that you already have at least a working knowledge of JavaScript. If you don’t yet feel comfortable calling yourself a “ServiceNow developer”, consider reading another book by Tim to get up to Learning ServiceNow ( 978-1785883323) which you can find at the link As long as you have a basic understanding of the ServiceNow platform though, think of this book as your roadmap to ensuring that your work in ServiceNow will be clean, effective, safe, and robust.

Genres: Reference

88 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 12, 2018

About the author

Tim is a Sr. Director of Cloud Engineering, a technical architect, developer, and trainer with a focus on the ServiceNow ITSM+ platform. He's also an author, but I feel like you've probably figured that out.

Tim has been working in IT, software development, and information security for two decades, and writes a popular ServiceNow development blog, SN Pro Tips, where a myriad of articles and free tools can be found. Tim is also the founder of The Precipice Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity dedicated to preventing homelessness before it happens.

When not keeping busy with ServiceNow, writing books and articles, publishing free tools, and working to prevent homelessness, Tim enjoys studying physics, exploring ghost towns, and going on road trips with his three-legged doggo, Ezri (@threelegger on Instagram).

Occasionally, Tim writes author biographies for himself in third-person because that seems to be what everyone else is doing.

He feels pretty weird about it.

LinkedIn: /sn-timw
Twitter/Threads: @TheTimWoodruff
Instagram: @TheTimWoodruff

Reviews

[Dominik Šimůnek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short book of collected tips & tricks for ServiceNow developers. It is not a book that you should start with when becoming a ServiceNow developer because it does not teach you in a structured way from beginner topics to advanced topics. But read it early enough in your career, right at the time you understand the basics of ServiceNow development. This book will then provide you quite a lot of pro-tips that will make you a better developer.

[Jace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tim’s handbook has loads of solid tips you would only find from personal experience

There’s a few books out there and I took the last few days to review this book (I pre ordered). The advise in the book is top notch and given in a great way.

I would buy/read again.

[Stephanie H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must-have for developers on ServiceNow. It’s brief, cutting back on any unnecessary beginner’s information for the more experienced developers, but is also dense with all the information needed to create an experience which is smooth and easy for developers and clients alike. As such, you definitely need a basic understanding of ServiceNow and Javascript before diving into this book. Fortunately, if you don’t already have this knowledge, Tim Woodruff also has a beginner’s guide to ServiceNow called Learning ServiceNow (which I think I will be wanting to check out as well).

For such a…dry subject, for lack of better words, Woodruff manages to insert engaging humor through the quotes at the beginning of each chapter and even some of his example codes. (I’m still cracking up from the example that incorporated the Simpsons.) All humor aside, Woodruff clearly knows his stuff and presents it in a well-organized, relatively easy-to-understand manner. You can read through the entire book to get a feel for how to approach ServiceNow better before starting a project, or you can skip to the parts you need a refresher on as you are in the midst of creating tables or code. Of course, you’ll probably want to do both—Woodruff points out mistakes which should be obvious but aren’t actually spotted until it’s too late to fix them, so better safe than sorry!

All in all, this book is a perfect cheat-sheet for developers working with ServiceNow. In the modern age with all of the technology and information being thrown at us, it’s almost impossible to figure everything out on our own and remember it when it’s time to put the knowledge into practice; books like ServiceNow Development Handbook help to keep us on the right path, saving us hours of missteps, frustrations, and coworkers or clients getting ticked off.

[Gursimran Singh]

awesome book

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a book for work. As a new ServiceNow developer it is useful to have some common sense guidelines and best practices. We implemented some of them into our processes.