I recently purchased the book Microsoft SharePoint 2013 App Development to try to get more familiar with the changes coming about in SharePoint 2013 apps. The link points to the O’Reilly site, but you can also get it from Amazon too. (As a side note, I find it very hard to read a printed book anymore; everything I’ve read in the last two years has been on one of my mobile devices.)
SharePoint 2013 introduces a new application model that Microsoft intends to correct several of the problems in SharePoint 2010 development. This book does a good job of explaining the various application development models available for SP 2013, including the following:
- SharePoint hosted app
- Provider hosted app (cloud)
- Auto hosted (Office 365)
At 202 pages, the book is not overwhelming and gets to the point very quickly. After a brief introduction to the various app models and a discussion of the problems inherit in SP2010, the authors quickly get into how to create the provider- and auto-hosted applications with real examples.
In addition, the book discusses client side programming for SharePoint 2013 apps since the server side API is not supported in 2013 apps. The authors go on to introduce Javascript for SP developers and also dive into JQuery development.
A third chapter discusses application security, including concepts like SAML, OAuth, and form-based authentication. These are important concepts as the app model moves to provider hosted and auto hosted.
The final chapter goes into application development patterns and explains the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern that is becoming popular for REST-based applications. The authors also cover Model-View-Controller (MVC) as well.
Overall Scot Hillier and Ted Pattison put together a well written book that should be read by all SharePoint 2013 developers.
