Practical SharePoint Framework (SPFx) Development, a book review

Introduction

I’m a huge fan of technical books — especially those aimed at beginners.

If you’ve been following my blog, you already know how passionate I am about helping newcomers. When I started my career as a developer, I had only a basic understanding of object-oriented programming and a pile of books to guide me through my journey.

Recently, I came across a fantastic book on Packt titled Practical SharePoint Framework (SPFx) Development, and it’s exactly the kind of resource I wish I’ve had when I was starting out. In this post, I’ll walk you through what makes this book special and why I think it’s a must-read for SPFx beginners.

Book content

First part

The book starts with a very detailed and helpful section. This section guides readers through various introductory aspects.

To have an idea, some of the topics that are covered here are:

• the basic knowledge for working with SharePoint Framework, like the tools used to create and build components.
• an overview of the available components that can be created with SPFx.
• overview of the SharePoint REST APIs and Graph APIs.

A great choice from the authors was to use a case study that continues throughout the entire book. This project, is used in all the chapters to demonstrate the various capabilities of the SharePoint Framework in a consistent, real-world context.

Second part

This section offers a comprehensive guide to working with web parts. It offers a great overview of various topics mainly obviously regarding web parts:

• It explains the basics of creating a SPFx solution.
• building and deploying a web part.
• how to use the Graph API to retrieve items.
• handling styles and themes in web parts.
• localizing the web part strings.
• how to configure the web part using the property pane.
• connect web parts together to share data.

This is a great overview of the capabilities of the web parts in SPFx.

Third part

In this part, the book dives into the various extensions available in SharePoint Framework.

It explains how to build the various available extensions:

• Application customizer
• Form customizer
• Field customizer
• ListView command set
• Adaptive Card Extension (ACE)
• Search query modifier

For each of the extension, it explains what exactly are the usages, how to build and deploy the extensions.

I particularly liked the coverage of search query modifiers — an extremely useful but often overlooked extension.

Fourth part

This was my favorite section. It’s packed with valuable content and is incredibly helpful.

It begins with an exploration of library components — an excellent feature in SharePoint Framework that allows developers to centralize code, avoid duplication, and reuse logic across different solutions.

There are many useful insights about debugging an SPFx solution (both web parts and extensions), from the workbench to debug the solution directly in a production environment.

There are also insights about how to consume different types of APIs, from the SharePoint REST APIs, the Microsoft Graph APIs and APIs secured using Entra ID.

Testing has also a dedicated chapter, where the different types of tests are explained, with a focus on using Jest. This is quite useful to understand how to write and execute tests to validate the code of your solution.

Personal thoughts

One of the things I’ve appreciated the most about this book — aside from how helpful it is for beginners — was the attention given to the PnP (Patterns and Practices) initiative. It’s great to see the community recognized and receive some space in a professional resource like this.

If I were to suggest areas for improvement, I would have liked to see a bit more focus on integration testing. Jest and unit testing is covered in a great way, but the integration testing might have been covered a bit more in detail (maybe using Playwright).

Also, a brief section about Node Version Manager (NVM) would have been helpful for managing multiple Node.js versions, which is common in real-world development. This would have been an awesome hint helping new developers handling multiple Node.js versions on a single development machine.

Conclusions

This book is a must-read for all beginners interested in SharePoint Framework development. It covers the fundamentals thoroughly, guiding readers from initial setup to more advanced topics like testing, deployment, and also showing real-world usage.

If you want to get started with SPFx, I highly recommend giving this book a read. It’s a fantastic resource.

If you’re interested you can find it on Packt or Amazon.

Hope this helps!