This is a great book for functional AX folks who wants to step into AX development but it is a little short on the developers who wants to learn about AX development. As it can be understood from it`s title it just gets you started in this area. For more information, official AX development manuals are needed since they are over 1000+ pages. It is well put together and starts with a little bit of general information about AX and then gets complicated with AOT and X++. It really summarizes how the different modules interact with each other in a functional way so the developers can understand the work-flow in AX better. I think this is a very key point that the official dev. manuals are missing. ERD`s really helps developers to understand and visualize the lay-out in AX in a time efficient way. The book starts developing a car rental application and walks you through necessary steps. I think this is a great idea and something can be used in real life. It includes creating tables, forms, queries, reports and menu's basically all the information to create a basic module from scratch.

In my opinion in some areas, the book is over-focused on unnecessary things like export/import and missing some other key elements where the official manuals come into play.The codes that are provided seemed pretty accurate excluding the typos. I think the editor could do a better job on this rather than using word spelling check.

Overall, I am giving this book 4 stars. The reason I am giving 4 stars is that some of the information is kind of outdated. The book got stuck into 4.0 version and did not consider the improvements in 2009. Since the new version is coming out soon, some of the information is going to be useless. It is still a good starting point for the functional consultants who want to get an overall idea about the development world without going too much into detail. I would still recommend the official devI-II-III-IV manuals for the technical folks if you have access to them. This book might be a little shorthanded for the developers.