First off, it is a monster of a book at 611 pages. Julian Sharp has done a masterful job of providing a broad overview and dive into the topic areas and the skills you need to know to be able to sum up the courage to take the PL-200 Exam. Understand no one book or a reading of one book is going to get you a passing grade on a Microsoft exam. It takes time, energy and effort to become sufficiently proficient to pass the exam. But what this book will do for you is to identify all the topic areas, provide you with a good foundation of the core information you need on the topic and give you some exercises to practice. From there you will be able to work on building your skills, experimenting with the features so that you can become thoroughly experienced to answer the broad range of questions on the exam.In the book Julian not only explains where to click, he explains why and what happens next and alternative approaches.I found the text surprisingly easy to read and the examples straight forward to apply.

This is one of the best book purchases I have made, I have passed 9 Microsoft exams. This book alone helped me prepare and pass PL-200. This is more than just an exam prep book, this is essentially the cookbook for Microsoft Power Platform so I have referred back to it a couple of times already. If you want to pass PL-200, this is the book to have in your personal library.

This is an exam guide and it provides excellent content for those preparing for their certification. But this book also provides learning content for those who are relatively new to the platform. Each chapter provides an overview into Power Platform tools and capabilities and chapter end questions do a great job testing your understanding

Great book for studying PL 200

As a “self-taught”, practicing, professional Power Platform developer who now fashions himself as a bit of an expert, particularly in Power Apps Canvas apps and Automate, this volume is a very nice addition to my library. It is quite comprehensive, and given the rapid evolution of the platform, surprisingly up to date.Given that I don’t actually plan on taking the exam it prepares you for, the breadth and depth of the content is excellent. I wish that I had had this volume available while I was “self-teaching” myself as it frames up the, for example, different approaches to UI/UX development (Model-driven vs. Canvas vs. Portal) and Classic Workflows vs Power Automate nicely although I would have like a little more discussion about when to use which approach.While I don’t expect to get heavily involved in Model-driven apps, I would like to, at least, be able to build simple ones or know how to evaluate the work of someone I might hire. And for Portal apps, I am on the verge of building a few for a customer, and will try to use the content to help me get at it quicker. I am sorry that there isn’t more of the “hard-knocks” (meaning of course, all of the undocumented weirdness that comes with this evolving Microsoft platform) learning that I am sure is in front of me based on my extensive Canvas App and Cloud Flow experience.If I have any gripes about the book, I excuse them because it is a book that “teaches to the test”. As we all know in real life education, this approach does not fully prepare you for the kinds of problems you will actually encounter when you try to use the material in the book in a real situation. It focuses on things that might be outdated like Classic Workflows (and to some extent Model-driven Apps) that you are likely to encounter if you are part of a Dynamics365 implementation but probably won’t spend too much time on if the client doesn’t have those products. Surprisingly, it doesn’t do much of anything around PowerApps as a replacement for InfoPath in SharePoint where I have found the current online communities “overfocused” so I don’t miss it but it is a notable omission.It has the best review of Dataverse/CDS including the underlying Security Model that I have encountered so far. Again very good if you are working with D365 and in my case developing something new where I don’t want to be spending too much time developing using either the simplistic Excel data backends, SharePoint Lists, or the heavy and more complex SQL backends. At the same time, I do feel it is very light on connecting to existing SQL backend data stores, that “heavy or not”, you are very likely to find as your most common backend data store. I think a stronger emphasis on tying together CDS, SQL and web service backend data using JSON into an integrated, practical but mite complex data environment would have been valuable however, as I said “since that isn’t in the test, why teach it”.Similarly, while the Security Model coverage is excellent, in my case, for instance, since my primary client hasn’t implemented it and doesn’t seem motivated to adopt it, in real-life you must adapt and innovate to use what you can, work around what you can’t and still deliver a secure solution. Again, not on the test.My final thought is that, it presents a lot of material as if the products are real, complete and mature which they are not. UI Flows, Power Virtual Agents, AI Builder and Solutions are the best examples. Again you will be learning what you need to “pass a test” and not actually what you need to be able to use these rapidly changing and evolving functions, features and tools. My experience over the past 18 months is that these things are constantly changing under your feet. Menus and operations can literally change from day to day with little or no warning, and this volume does not do enough to warn you about the differences between “passing the test” and using the products to “deliver solutions to your clients”.All in all though, I highly recommend it as a base textbook if you are preparing yourself or a team to “pass the test”.