Getting Started with AX Development? A New Book for You
There’s a new book about development in Dynamics AX 2009 called Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Programming: Getting Started. The title of this book includes “getting started” and from that perspective, the book delivers. It contains useful information for beginning AX developers as well as consultants or anyone that wants to get a better understanding of the tools and technologies for development in AX.
In the spirit of full disclosure, the publisher sent me a copy of the book to review. With that said, I’ll start with the highlights. The book contains a lot of code samples and walkthroughs. It takes you through the process of building a small application which is one of the best ways to learn a new technology. It’s also clearly written such that beginning programmers or even non-programmers with a highly technical background would be able to understand. It covers a full range of development topics including the development environment, the AX architecture, X++, storing data, forms, and Enterprise Portal.
On the downside, the book’s readability is hampered by the many typos, misspellings and grammatical errors it contains. There is also some information missing such as coverage of AIF in the chapter about integrating data. There’s also no mention of the services that ship with AX that automatically expose business logic.
In a nutshell, Getting Started provides some good foundational information about development in AX. It’s a good resource for developers and one you should consider adding to your bookshelf. The book is a good starting point, but if you’re planning any AX development projects, you would be well served to investigate further using additional resources such as: talking with other developers, newsgroups, blogs, other books and the AX Developer Center.
Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Programming: Getting Started was written by Erlend Dalen and published by Packt Publishing. The chapter Searching for Data is available online for free. For a list of other books about development in Microsoft Dynamics AX, check out the Books page on our MSDN Developer Center.