Book Reviews: ServiceNow Development Handbook by Tim Woodruff

As most of you know, I’m a nerd. I’m a HUGE nerd. However, I’m literary nerd, not a computer nerd. Trust me, there is a distinct difference. Still, the paths of the literary nerd and the computer nerd often cross, and that is why I’m switching gears from Heartache: Bad Boy Vibes to a book picked especially for the computer nerds among us. Even if you’re not a computer nerd but someone trying to find a new way to handle the technical aspects of his/her small business, you’ll want to check this book out, too. This review will cover ServiceNow Development Handbook: A compendium of pro-tips, guidelines, and best practices for ServiceNow developers by Tim Woodruff.

The title pretty much says it all. This book is a brief guide—around 86 pages—to help developers navigate and best utilize ServiceNow, an all-in-one service software with a focus on IT services. (For more information on ServiceNow, make sure to visit their website.) This guide is not meant to be a step-by-step training guide to ServiceNow (for that, check out Woodruff’s other book, Learning ServiceNow). Instead, Woodruff assumes that the reader has a basic knowledge of the service and Javascript and provides him/her with guidance to avoiding making simple mistakes and create a smooth, relatively stress-free experience for him/herself and his/her team.

For such a short book, this guide is rather dense. By that I mean it’s information-dense, something for which I’m sure developers will be grateful. From naming conventions to formatting tables and guidelines for coding, this guide seems like the perfect cheat-sheet for people trying to make the most out of their ServiceNow IT experience. The sections are labelled well enough and independent enough that you can peruse the table of contents, find the section you have a question about, and skip to that section without having to waste precious time on anything unnecessary.

Of course, you’ll want to use Woodruff’s guide for more than immediate emergencies. Some issues Woodruff addresses are ones you probably wouldn’t even think of until it’s already too late. For example, in the “Naming Conventions” chapter, he points out how careful one must be in naming tables. Not only should the names be singular, but they also need to be easily pluralized by simply adding an “s” to the end. That’s how the system pluralizes the title when there are multiple records in that table, so if you have a name which ends in something like “Entry”, it will pluralize to “Entrys” rather than “Entries”. That’s probably not something you’re really thinking about when you’re naming tables, and so it’s best to read Woodruff’s entire guide before starting a project on ServiceNow to avoid such trivial, though still embarrassing, mistakes.

While Woodruff has to use a lot of technical terms in order to convey his point, he also makes the book less dry by inserting some humor. At the beginning of each chapter, Woodruff introduces the subject through use of quotes. Given the niche nature of this topic, there aren’t too many recognizable quotes that will fit it. Regardless, Woodruff modifies the quotes and adds “almost” after citing the speaker, as in:

Know thy users.

–Socrates, almost

One moment of humor which also stuck out to me was his use of names from the Simpsons family in one of his example codes. The example codes themselves serve as useful guides as to how developers should code certain tables, columns, etc., and the use of the Simpsons made it both more entertaining and easier to understand. It’s Woodruff’s humor which kept me engaged as a non-developer, and I’m sure that developers will benefit from it even more.

Mind you, this guide is exactly that, a guide. It’s not a rigid, step-by-step command as to how to use ServiceNow and, as in writing, rules in developing are made to be broken once you know and understand them.

Overall, this book is great for what it is, a guide to help developers. The terminology will probably go over the heads of my non-computer nerd users, but the IT gems among the bunch should find this right up their alley. Also, if you work in and/or operate a small business, you might want to bring up this book and ServiceNow to your IT team. You never know—you might just become the office hero for saving time and stress!

You can buy ServiceNow Development Handbook by Tim Woodruff as an eBook and in paperback on Amazon. Also make sure to check out Tim Woodruff’s website for information on this, Learning ServiceNow, and his other books.

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