This page contains links to a few sections of Tim Woodruff's ServiceNow Development Handbook (4th Edition). The below sections are available for download, for free.
These excerpts are a sneak-peek at some of the content in the 4th Edition of the ServiceNow Development Handbook. If you find these excerpts useful, you can get the full book on Paperback, Kindle, or Kobo.
Note: There may be minor formatting or content differences in the PDFs below, as they were exported from an earlier draft of the 4th edition. To see the latest and greatest content, check out the paperback, Kindle, or Kobo versions of The ServiceNow Development Handbook.
Learn about the different types of Business Rules in ServiceNow, the order of operations for Business Rules, and what each different type should (and should not) be used for. This section of the ServiceNow Development Handbook will teach you how to use ServiceNow's Business Rules effectively and efficiently, and will help you avoid common pitfalls and mistakes in ServiceNow server-side scripting.
ServiceNow's Flow Designer can be quite useful in certain situations (and the ServiceNow platform all but forces you to use it in some cases); but it definitely shouldn't be the first tool you reach for to solve all your problems. It's no workflow-panacea, and it's certainly not a replacement for good old-fashioned high-performance code. The Flow Designer chapter of The ServiceNow Development Handbook explains some of the many, many reasons why; and this excerpt is one of my favorite sections of that chapter. If you enjoy nerd-rants, it might be your favorite, too.
Instance cloning best-practices, pitfalls, gotchas, and example "clone cadences" for single-dev and multi-dev-environment instances. This section of the ServiceNow Development Handbook should help you learn the importance of cloning, and how to properly establish a clone cadence for your organization.
Understanding code and query performance in ServiceNow, especially relating to query efficiency in both single and multi-record queries. This section of the ServiceNow Development Handbook should help you understand the subtleties of performance in ServiceNow, and how to write good, efficient ServiceNow code and queries.
This section of the ServiceNow Development Handbook explains how to use "scripted records" in ServiceNow to improve the configurability and modularity of your application or functionality.
This section of the ServiceNow Development Handbook explains how to use the ServiceNow server-side debugger. The debugger is surprisingly functional, and is something that every ServiceNow developer should know how to use!
This section explains what session variables are, and how to use them in ServiceNow. It teaches you about how to store and maintain session-specific data, how to pass it to and use it from the client, and what use-cases this functionality has. (Spoiler: It's quite useful!)
Some pro-tips and guidelines on managing Update Sets in ServiceNow. There's some really interesting stuff in here, as well as references to some free tools I've published to help you manage Update Sets more effectively, such as Smarter Update Sets.
Getting your app ready to publish to the ServiceNow store is way more complicated than you might imagine, and it's something you've got to start thinking about before you've even created the app-scope to begin with. There's mandatory documentation, required UI pages with support contact information, and you've even got to build it with your own specific vendor-scope-prefix, in your own specific vendor instance (which, of course, costs thousands of dollars). There's a lot to consider! This free PDF chapter export helps get you started, and the rest of the ServiceNow Development Handbook will teach you everything else you need to know to successfully publish your app to the ServiceNow store.