ServiceNow Development Handbook - 4th Edition: A compendium of ServiceNow "NOW" platform development and architecture pro-tips, guidelines, and best practices

by Tim Woodruff, Nick Nash

ServiceNow is a powerful enterprise workflow platform with a massively configurable back-end. One of its greatest benefits is the ease with which it can be configured and customized, letting you do nearly anything you can imagine.
This is also its greatest risk.
To realize the full benefits of ServiceNow's customizability without risking the integrity of your instance, requires deep knowledge of the arcane ins-and-outs of the ServiceNow platform, its capabilities, and its corresponding pitfalls and "gotchas".

The goal of the ServiceNow Development Handbook is to make you a better ServiceNow admin, dev, and architect. It does this by showing you not only what best-practice *is*, but *why* certain practices are considered "best" and why others are pitfalls. These lessons would otherwise be learned the hard way or not at all.
By reading and understanding the concepts in this compendium of ServiceNow knowledge, you will be able to build more robust, resilient, and powerful ServiceNow solutions.

WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR
This book will be useful for ServiceNow admins, developers, and architects. It is not a ServiceNow training course meant to take you from start to finish. It's aimed at ServiceNow administrators, developers, and architects, who have at least a little experience, whether that's on-the-job, or just building your portfolio. It's also extremely helpful to have a basic understanding of JavaScript before getting started with this book.

If you're just starting your ServiceNow career, consider reading my other book, "Learning ServiceNow, Second Edition" ( 978-1788837040).
You can find Learning ServiceNow at

280 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 3, 2025

About the author

Tim is a Sr. Director of Cloud Engineering, a technical architect, developer, and trainer with a focus on the ServiceNow ITSM+ platform. He's also an author, but I feel like you've probably figured that out.

Tim has been working in IT, software development, and information security for two decades, and writes a popular ServiceNow development blog, SN Pro Tips, where a myriad of articles and free tools can be found. Tim is also the founder of The Precipice Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity dedicated to preventing homelessness before it happens.

When not keeping busy with ServiceNow, writing books and articles, publishing free tools, and working to prevent homelessness, Tim enjoys studying physics, exploring ghost towns, and going on road trips with his three-legged doggo, Ezri (@threelegger on Instagram).

Occasionally, Tim writes author biographies for himself in third-person because that seems to be what everyone else is doing.

He feels pretty weird about it.

LinkedIn: /sn-timw
Twitter/Threads: @TheTimWoodruff
Instagram: @TheTimWoodruff