Customer Reviews

Peoplesoft Developer's Handbook

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Of the 592 pages, 460 are devoted to the Application Designer (PeopleTools). The remaining cover Peoplecode, SQR, Crystal,Nvision Configuration manager and a tiny bit on upgrades. I would hardly call it a Handbook as all it does is go through an example.

Having taken Peopletools 1 and 2 from Peoplesoft, this book was review material only. This is a good refresher however, but unlike Oracle you cant really practice unless your company actually has Peoplesoft that they let you play with.

I am new to PeopleSoft and enjoyed the book as it provided hands-on learning, however, there were so many type-o's that it was quite frustrating trying to follow along. Also, I wish more topics had been covered in the detail that Application Designer was covered. If you want to learn any PeopleTools other than AppDesigner, this is not your book. The sections on nVision, Query, and PeopleCode are lacking to say the least.

Overall good introduction to the Applications Designer, but loaded with typos. Screen shots make up the bulk of the book. Very repetative text which is good for beginers but cumbersome for itermediates and advanced developers.

Completed (well almost, more on that later) the whole book on a PS v7.5 standalone machine in about 10-12 man hours. Here's my review:

The Good:

1. Lots of exercises/repetitions.

2. Liberal use of graphics for easy sign-posts.

3. Very organized overall.

The Bad:

1. Lots of exercises/repetitions. Perhaps too much?

2. Plenty of typos and outright missed some elements - one should figure out the workarounds after doing the exercises thanks for the easy following sign-posts, however. Although some were not obvious and can frustrate beginners and cause them to abandon course before completion. Definitely a case of quantity over quality in lights of The Bad #1 above.

3. Can't fully see your own exercise lab's results until the END of the WHOLE book. It should encourage the best pratice of unit testing after each panel completion in the lab; this is a big one to miss by the book's authors since unit testing is a fundamental task of software application development life-cycle methodology.

4. Did not offer a forum/email/website for post-published corrections/user feedbacks. Did the publishers/authors really expect version 1 of their technical book to be error-free?

The Ugly:

1. Between the "Security" and the "Testing the Application" chapters, the authors didn't bother to tell us HOW to compile the application for TESTING. Hello, did the dog ate the WHOLE chapter on codes compilation here?

I just purchased the book and have not read it completely, but I was surprised at the poor quality of many of the screen shots. Blurry, fuzzy, some small details lost in some. As one other reviewer noted, there are a lot of screen images (good), but I would have expected better quality and clarity. Sometimes the details of the windows/panels are important - especially to PeopleSoft newcomers. I was also surprised that I could find no e-mail addresses for the authors to pass my comments onto directly.

I am new to PeopleSoft and I found this book very useful. The delivered documentation fails to put any of the objects in order, making it very hard to get up and running. This book although repetitive in several areas gave me a good understanding of how to create new PeopleSoft functionality.

Very hard to read the text in the screen shots. This book does not pertain to any application like HR or Payroll. But it does a good job covering peopletools. I need a book that covers HR and Pension applications using HR database tables and columns. I work on HR interfaces to existing mainframe systems but would like to learn online/peopletools.

Very hard to read the text in the screen shots. This book does not pertain to any application like HR or Payroll. But it does a good job covering peopletools. I need a book that covers HR and Pension applications using HR database tables and columns.

I read the manuscript on the publishers betabook site last month. It was rough manuscript but I got to see the content. Don't abuse a book by giving it one star when you don't know all the facts.

nice reading & a must for peoplesoft implementor