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ServiceNow Development Handbook: A Compendium of Guidelines and Best Practices for ServiceNow Developers
ServiceNow is a powerful ITSM (IT Service Management) software solution with a massively configurable back-end.
One of the greatest benefits of ServiceNow is that it lets you do just about anything you could want to do, to suit the needs of your business.
On that same note, one of the most dangerous things about ServiceNow, is that it lets you do just about anything! With such freedom and capacity for customization, comes risk, but that risk is not without great reward, which you can realize with a strong understanding of best-practice.
Description
The goal of this book is to explore the pitfalls, standards, and best-practices that most ServiceNow ITSM developers either learn the hard way, or never learn at all. These are the things that every developer wishes they knew from day one, and which - once learned - will make you a more effective and efficient developer.
This book will teach you how to avoid pitfalls, and empower you with knowledge that will allow you to build much more robust, resilient, powerful, and efficient solutions within the platform.
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 behind those standards to other areas of the platform and development. It'll make you a more effective administrator, developer, or architect.
That’s that spirit in which this compendium was written: Teaching and explaining, not simply listing out a series of arcane edicts under the heading of “best-practice”. The ServiceNow Development handbook will serve to boost your knowledge, your confidence, and your career.
What to expect
The ServiceNow Development Handbook covers a wide range of topics including (but not limited to):
Coding guidelines
Writing DRY code
Pass-by-reference
Controlling fields in the client
AJAX and asynchronicity
When not to code
Debugging
Naming conventions
List and form design
Testing
Execution paths
Impersonation
Handling Errors
Code documentation
Update sets
Batching and merging
What is (and isn't) tracked
Tracking scoped records
Performance
Query efficiency
Nested queries
Service portal
Widgets and option schema
Portal coding best-practices
Security
Who this book is for
Administrators and developers at any level of their ITSM development career would find the information in this handbook useful.
One of the greatest benefits of ServiceNow is that it lets you do just about anything you could want to do, to suit the needs of your business.
On that same note, one of the most dangerous things about ServiceNow, is that it lets you do just about anything! With such freedom and capacity for customization, comes risk, but that risk is not without great reward, which you can realize with a strong understanding of best-practice.
Description
The goal of this book is to explore the pitfalls, standards, and best-practices that most ServiceNow ITSM developers either learn the hard way, or never learn at all. These are the things that every developer wishes they knew from day one, and which - once learned - will make you a more effective and efficient developer.
This book will teach you how to avoid pitfalls, and empower you with knowledge that will allow you to build much more robust, resilient, powerful, and efficient solutions within the platform.
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 behind those standards to other areas of the platform and development. It'll make you a more effective administrator, developer, or architect.
That’s that spirit in which this compendium was written: Teaching and explaining, not simply listing out a series of arcane edicts under the heading of “best-practice”. The ServiceNow Development handbook will serve to boost your knowledge, your confidence, and your career.
What to expect
The ServiceNow Development Handbook covers a wide range of topics including (but not limited to):
Coding guidelines
Writing DRY code
Pass-by-reference
Controlling fields in the client
AJAX and asynchronicity
When not to code
Debugging
Naming conventions
List and form design
Testing
Execution paths
Impersonation
Handling Errors
Code documentation
Update sets
Batching and merging
What is (and isn't) tracked
Tracking scoped records
Performance
Query efficiency
Nested queries
Service portal
Widgets and option schema
Portal coding best-practices
Security
Who this book is for
Administrators and developers at any level of their ITSM development career would find the information in this handbook useful.
- GenresReference
118 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 20, 2018
109 people are currently reading
96 people want to read
About the author
Tim Woodruff
9 books5 followersTim 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
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
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 10, 2021
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.
October 26, 2021
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.
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.
February 24, 2018
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.
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.
Currently reading
August 13, 2018awesome book
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 13, 2019
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.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews