I've been pushing off writing this review for a while now; primarily because the kind of book is very hard, if not impossible, to read cover to cover. This is a cookbook, it contains more than 60 recipes on how to accomplish various AX development tasks. I've decided to review the book based on the premise that it is a cookbook. To me a valuable cookbook contains recipes for desirable results (i.e. something I wish I could cook), and a valuable recipe enables me to reproduce the result (i.e. I'll be able to cook). This book delivers exactly that.
Each recipe in the book contains an introduction, a "How to do it" and a "How it works" section. This makes the recipes easy to follow, and provides bits of necessary and interesting background information. The book only contains recipes on classic MorphX AX tasks - you will not find any recipes on SSRS reports or Enterprise Portal development - which is a shame, as ramping up knowledge in these new areas is just as important.
The majority of the book is listings of X++ source code. If you, like me, likes to read code this book is for you. The book reminds me of my early teenage years where I subscribed to a Danish magazine named Source, which contained various implementations of various programs. The code in this book is focused at getting the job done, the code is direct and to the point - it doesn't contain comments or labels. For production quality code I would expect more, but this is a cookbook, and by keeping the code simple the book becomes easier to read.
I have a secondary reason for liking this book. My job in the Microsoft Dynamics AX team is to enable developers to be productive, in other words making it easy to accomplish AX development tasks. This books give me and my team a good perspective into some typical tasks, and how easy (or cumbersome) they are to accomplish. For this reason this book will get a position within reach on my bookshelf.