About one month ago I was pleased to be contacted by Packt Publishing in order to give a review of their last book about Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
The book is "Programming Microsoft Dynamics NAV" by David Studebaker and this is one of the few books that talks about developing with Dynamics NAV.
This is a 460 page book (11 chapters) that covers the needs of developers that are starting to approach the NAV development to developers that are experts on NAV development but want to know more. It starts to introduce the Application Design concepts inside NAV, then it goes more in-depth into every NAV object (Tables, Forms and Reports in particular). After that, the author goes in depth into the CSIDE and the C/AL code by clearly explaining all you need in order to create NAV applications (C/AL sintax, validation functions, data conversion functions, I/O functions, filtering etc.).
Chapters from 9 to 11 are "the plus" of this book and they're devoted to experienced developer. They cover aspects about architecturing and tuning a NAV solution, working with external applications and other design tips.
The nice thing is that a sample application for a fictitious company is developed throughout the book, so the reader can immediately learn the concepts and put them in practice.
So... what's my final opinion?
I think that this book is a great resource for anyone that wants to start learning NAV development because it covers all the aspects in details and in a clear manner. It covers also some hot topics such as code optimizations that are not so common to find on books (and also on Microsoft's official MOCs).
There's a good comparison between the native server and the SQL Server one, but I think that the optimization topics with SQL Server could be covered more in depth (index management, index statistics, MaintainSiftIndex, MaintainSQLIndex etc.). The same for the interaction with external programs and about how to extend NAV with other controls (for example .NET controls).
About form triggers, I've appreciated that the author alerts the NAV developer on placing code on form triggers as few as possible because the future NAV versions will further constrain, or may even eliminate, the ability to insert C/AL code directly within a form (use of calling a codeunit on a form is recommended).
If you're a NAV developer, I recommend you this book: it covers all the aspects you need for your work and something more. It lacks a bit on the SQL features topic, but this could be an argument for a dedicated book 
Great work David!
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