Salesforce CRM – The Definitive Admin Handbook - Third Edition

A fantastic resource for those looking to pass the Administrator Certification exam. After going through all relevant trails and badges on Trailhead, I moved onto this book and then onto an online course (an inexpensive one). Will this book help you pass the test all by itself? No, but the information is fantastic and organized into the right categories. While this book was written for a previous release of Salesforce, it is still a relevant resource. A new version is scheduled to be released in February 2017 and I recommend picking that up once it is available.

First of all - this book is for beginners in Salesforce, it will walk you through step by step for admin tasks including business process (workflow rules, approval process ...) all the way to data modeling. It is laid out very well so that you can almost start it and get hooked to this book for hours without feeling any overburden. Sometimes I feel it is a bit over-simplified, but what else would you want when you are starting. I skipped/glanced through a lot of sections since I know most of the areas. Where this book truly differentiates is the summary tables which are the author's summary of a particular function. Example : For workflow rules, the author has listed a nifty table which summarizes what it does and you just need to look at that one table and you will understand and remember what each of the different stuff in a workflow rule can do. Overall - this is not for advanced users, it is really good for someone starting off on Salesforce. It is good for 201 Exam ? It will get you started for the exam, but if you really want to pass the exam - read this book + take all the online quizzes for the 201 exam

So far this has been good. Working on getting Certified to be a Salesforce Admin. Lots of good knowledge in this book.

Wish there was reference to which release it used as model for content reference. It appears about 3 releases old, I probably would not have purchased it then.

This book is a great resource. It's especially good for any beginning admin that wants to expand on their skills.

This book has a lot information on sales force that will help me prepare for the certification

I bought this book directly from Packt Publishing during one of their $5 dollar bonanza deals, along with a handful of other Salesforce related titles from administration topics to apex development. As another reviewer stated, this book is for beginners just learning Salesforce, "It is laid out very well so that you can almost start it and get hooked to this book for hours without feeling any overburden. Sometimes I feel it is a bit over-simplified, but what else would you want when you are starting. I skipped/glanced through a lot of sections since I know most of the areas." It doesn't go too deep into any particular topic, but for a beginner that may be a good thing because the platform is quite overwhelming at first due to breadth of what's available. The book does do a good job giving overviews of the various concepts and topics listed in the index. At first, I felt like this only repeated what the free Salesforce online help docs already provide, and it does do that to a large extent, but where it shines is in the screen shots. Even with 2 years of full time advanced administration under my belt, I thought the screen shots and the author's personal comments/tips were quite valuable -- insight you don't get with the online help docs. That is a plus! One bit of advice I liked was the author's common sense tip in the chapter about creating custom fields. Yes, Salesforce makes it very easy to add custom fields -- a reason we all love the platform -- but it's also easy to fall into the trap of creating lots of fields without considering the consequences. The author provides about 3-4 good paragraphs explaining the pros/cons and what to consider before creating a custom field. I thought the advice was so valuable I immediately shared it with the rest of my Salesforce dev team! All in all, the book gives a fair overview of the many areas of Salesforce and the author provides excellent screen shots to accompany the information (not found in the Salesforce online help docs) as well as provide his own advice and tips from real-world experience. If you've got the time, the ebook price is nice so I'd recommend you get a copy.

A must for all SF Admins. The latest edition is based on latest changes/updates and new features added to SF, which helped me a lot in my Admin certification preparation. And I also refer it refer it on day to day basis for my work. If I have to define it in few words then those would be - crisp, clear and content.