Through­out the year, SAP Press releas­es a vari­ety of books and e‑bites focused on spe­cif­ic solu­tions and parts of the SAP ecosys­tem. These are great resources authored by solu­tion and indus­try experts. ASUG had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to chat with the authors of the four best-sell­ing 2021 releas­es from SAP Press. Here are some quick insights into the scope and focus of those releases.

Mate­ri­als Man­age­ment with SAP S/4HANA—Jawad Akhtar

ASUG: Can you give us an overview of your book? 

Jawad: The book is a deep dive into the mate­ri­als man­age­ment com­po­nent of SAP S/4HANA, includ­ing its sub-com­po­nents, such as pur­chas­ing and inven­to­ry man­age­ment. The focus of the book is to con­nect the four main pil­lars of any SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion: cus­tomiz­ing, mas­ter data, busi­ness process­es, and reporting. 

ASUG: How has your back­ground pre­pared you to write this book? 

Jawad: I start­ed out my SAP con­sult­ing and client-side career with a focus on mate­ri­als man­age­ment before branch­ing out to oth­er SAP com­po­nents. Hence, an almost two decades of SAP career with mul­ti­ple large and com­plex SAP projects has enabled me to share my knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence with the SAP logis­tics community.

ASUG: What do you hope read­ers get out of your book? 

Jawad: The book intends to be a one-stop ref­er­ence guide on almost all top­ics that are direct­ly or indi­rect­ly relat­ed to mate­ri­als man­age­ment in SAP S/4HANA. The fact that the book cov­ers sev­er­al ancil­lary top­ics, as well as next-gen­er­a­tion user inter­face, SAP Fiori, and var­i­ous SAP Fiori apps will not just help SAP con­sul­tants, but also SAP busi­ness users get the infor­ma­tion they need to set up, run, and even inte­grate SAP Mate­ri­als Man­age­ment with oth­er SAP logis­tics components. 

Con­fig­ur­ing Sales in SAP S/4HANA — Chris van Helfteren

ASUG: Can you give us an overview of your book? 

Chris: My book describes the func­tion­al­i­ty and relat­ed con­fig­u­ra­tion of SAP S/4HANA sys­tem fea­tures typ­i­cal­ly assigned to the order-to-cash work­stream, com­mon­ly known as sales, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and logis­tics exe­cu­tion mod­ules. The book was writ­ten to be used as ref­er­ence and train­ing mate­r­i­al for those that want to under­stand this por­tion of the sys­tems from both func­tion­al and tech­ni­cal per­spec­tives. It includes func­tion­al­i­ty that have been around for a while as well as the lat­est SAP S/4HANA functionality. 

ASUG: How has your back­ground pre­pared you to write this book? 

Chris: I have been work­ing with order-to-cash sys­tems for the past 30 years. The book con­tains obser­va­tions of how I’ve seen com­pa­nies use these sys­tems fea­tures over the years. This makes the book use­ful not only to learn how to use and con­fig­ure the sys­tem, but also how to make crit­i­cal design decisions.

ASUG: What do you hope read­ers get out of your book? 

Chris: This is intend­ed to help read­ers that want to become OTC con­sul­tants, peo­ple that work as an SAP S/4HANA sys­tems users of any lev­el, project and pro­gram man­agers, and recruit­ing part­ners and oth­er sys­tems resources. After read­ing the book, they would be equipped to not only take care of their own tasks more effi­cient­ly but also to com­mu­ni­cate and achieve their teams’ goals quick­er and more efficiently.

Clean ABAP—Rodri­go Jordão, Michel Mar­tin, Kai West­er­holz, Klaus Hae­up­tle, and Anagha Ravinarayan

ASUG: Can you give us an overview of your book? 

Rodri­go: Clean ABAP is an opin­ion­at­ed take on devel­op­ing ABAP code that is easy to read, under­stand, test, and main­tain. It enables a devel­op­ment team to be agile in how it devel­ops and responds to new and chang­ing require­ments and to scale in a fast-paced, cloud-first devel­op­ment environment.

Michel: The Clean ABAP book is a col­lec­tion of best prac­tices and their ratio­nales in order to spread not only the ​“how” to do cer­tain things, but also the ​“why?” Under­stand­ing the impli­ca­tions — even for small top­ics that are often deemed as ​“minor” but that tru­ly have deep and long-term impacts — helps to get more peo­ple on board. We all know we need to learn from our own mis­takes. How­ev­er, as time is lim­it­ed, we should also learn from the mis­takes of oth­ers instead of fig­ur­ing every­thing out on our own over and over.

Kai: Clean code is not new, but with the book, we want­ed to bring a shared under­stand­ing on how clean code looks for ABAP. At the same time, we did not want to print just a list of rules and say that if you fol­low all of them, you get Clean ABAP. We want to add the cru­cial part: how to apply these con­cepts as a team. This might lead to a dif­fer­ent set of rules for your team, because in your set­up, maybe it is not ide­al to start with the com­plete set as it can be over­whelm­ing. When read­ing through the book, it should be clear that each addi­tion­al rule that can be applied brings a ben­e­fit and maybe not all rules make sense in your envi­ron­ment. The goal is to make your code read­able, main­tain­able, and testable, and the giv­en rules sup­port this, but in the end, there might be a new or adapt­ed ver­sion of them that’s best for you.

Klaus: We also had the goal of hav­ing a shared under­stand­ing among the ABAP devel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ty of what clean code is for ABAP, and how to learn and prac­tice it as a team.

Anagha: Clean ABAP is a col­lec­tion of what the ABAP com­mu­ni­ty thinks the best prac­tices of devel­op­ing in ABAP should be. These best prac­tices have been com­piled and explained in detail in our book. It is a con­tin­u­ous­ly evolv­ing guide, bet­ter­ing itself as more ABAP pro­gram­mers work and find more read­able, under­stand­able, and testable cod­ing practices.

ASUG: How has your back­ground pre­pared you to write this book?

Rodri­go: For more than 20 years, I have been an advo­cate for all the pieces that are now part of clean ABAP. I’ve seen the dif­fer­ence they make in the wild, from main­tain­able and read­able code, to auto­mat­ed test­ing, refac­tor­ing, and clar­i­ty of think­ing in design­ing and imple­ment­ing a soft­ware project.

Michel: While I spent most of my years doing archi­tec­ture or devel­op­ment, I’ve played com­ple­men­tary roles (train­er, scrum and lean men­tor, project man­ag­er), which gave me addi­tion­al per­spec­tives on the impact of code qual­i­ty, which in turn affects the entire team or orga­ni­za­tion. I’ve always had a strong focus on qual­i­ty, and this book was a chance to voice the rea­sons of such and such best prac­tices. Some peo­ple only need to learn the rules, some peo­ple need to under­stand the ratio­nale behind those rules, and the more per­spec­tives we have, the more peo­ple we can reach and convince. 

Kai: As a devel­op­er, I am work­ing a lot with lega­cy code that was not writ­ten clean­ly, and with that, I see how inef­fi­cient this work can be. For a few years now, I was not only con­cen­trat­ed on writ­ing ​“clean ABAP” in the new objects I am cre­at­ing, but also, I apply the con­cepts every time I am touch­ing the lega­cy code­base. With the expe­ri­ence in com­bin­ing the new and the lega­cy, and work­ing with the team in a way that every­one can under­stand the code, I wrote this down in the book and I hope oth­ers can now lever­age it. 

Klaus: Clean code and sim­i­lar prac­tices were already part of my stud­ies in appli­ca­tion archi­tec­ture and part of my work when I start­ed at SAP. Lat­er, par­al­lel to my job as devel­op­er, I did a lot of train­ings and coach­ing of many teams on agile soft­ware engi­neer­ing prac­tices, includ­ing test-dri­ven devel­op­ment (TDD) and clean code. Besides, I drove many improve­ments via com­mu­ni­ty activ­i­ties, which helped to get the com­mu­ni­ty around clean ABAP start­ed. This helped to devel­op a shared under­stand­ing of what clean code is for ABAP.

Anagha: In my career as a devel­op­er, I’ve encoun­tered many kinds of code. Any­thing from messy, unread­able, immutable code, to mediocre code, to clean and pris­tine, well-doc­u­ment­ed, self-explana­to­ry, near­ly bug-proof code. And I’m sure many devel­op­ers can relate to this. This made me real­ize how the time and efforts of a fel­low devel­op­er can be best pre­served and put to bet­ter use, if every­one tried to write clean­er code.

ASUG: What do you hope read­ers get out of your book?

Rodri­go: Devel­op­ers should come away with a bevy of tools and ideas that will improve their work, make them more agile, and help them deliv­er faster and bet­ter code!

Michel: I am sure there are a lot of devel­op­ers out there that have felt the same pain as us, for instance, hav­ing to work with bad or ugly code. Every devel­op­er I met expressed neg­a­tive emo­tions about work­ing with bad code. How­ev­er, this tends to stag­nate as peo­ple feel hope­less: ​“Why should I change if no one else will fol­low?” When we col­lec­tive­ly decide it’s enough, we can all togeth­er pro­duce bet­ter code and improve lega­cy code, using the camp­site rule, where we all leave it clean­er than we found it. With this, I hope that one day, there will be an entire gen­er­a­tion of devel­op­ers who could say they nev­er saw bad or ugly code. Even if it is a high goal, we should remem­ber the quote ​“shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Kai: I think most of our read­ers are con­front­ed with at least some lega­cy code that is not writ­ten in a clean man­ner. I hope that our read­ers learn how they can write new code clean­er, and also that lega­cy code can be improved iter­a­tive­ly by apply­ing the con­cepts each time code is touched. In the begin­ning, the task can feel over­whelm­ing, but our read­ers should know that not all our points need to be used at once. Pick the ones that fit best, and grow and learn by using them more and more and encour­ag­ing your col­leagues as well. In the end, get your whole team on board!

Klaus: We want read­ers to learn how to write clean code for ABAP as a team, with a focus on read­able, main­tain­able, and testable code.

Anagha: I hope our read­ers put what they read into prac­tice and devel­op a habit of writ­ing clean ABAP code. And that they’ll spread the word so that their entire team can write clean code.

SAP S/4HANA Archi­tec­ture—Thomas Sauer­es­sig, Tobias Stein, Jochen Boed­er, and Wol­fram Kleis

ASUG: Can you give us an overview of your book? 

Authors: The book describes the archi­tec­ture of SAP S/4HANA in three parts. The first part of the book intro­duces the archi­tec­ture chal­lenges of mod­ern ERP soft­ware and describes the tech­ni­cal foun­da­tion of SAP S/4HANA.

It gives an overview of top­ics such as the vir­tu­al data mod­el, the ABAP REST­ful appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming mod­el, ana­lyt­ics, exten­si­bil­i­ty, inte­gra­tion, and machine learn­ing. The sec­ond part is about the busi­ness-lev­el archi­tec­ture of the core appli­ca­tions of SAP S/4HANA, for exam­ple, finance, sales, pro­cure­ment, and logis­tics and man­u­fac­tur­ing. This part explains the build­ing blocks of the dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions and how they com­mu­ni­cate and inter­act. The main func­tions, busi­ness objects, and data flows are explained and visu­al­ized with archi­tec­ture diagrams. 

The third part of the book focus­es on SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It describes the spe­cif­ic archi­tec­ture con­cepts designed to achieve the expect­ed cloud qual­i­ties and out­lines sev­er­al aspects of oper­at­ing SAP S/4HANA Cloud. This includes, for exam­ple, scop­ing and con­fig­u­ra­tion, sim­pli­fied iden­ti­ty and access man­age­ment, print­ing from the cloud, mul­ti-ten­an­cy, cloud secu­ri­ty, and compliance. 

ASUG: How has your back­ground pre­pared you to write this book? 

Authors: The chap­ters of the book were writ­ten by more than 60 experts from the SAP S/4HANA devel­op­ment orga­ni­za­tion, includ­ing man­agers, archi­tects, devel­op­ers, and prod­uct owners.

The edi­tors Thomas, Tobias, Jochen, and Wol­fram have deep expe­ri­ence in SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, and SAP tech­nol­o­gy as exec­u­tives or soft­ware architects. 

ASUG: What do you hope read­ers get out of your book? 

Authors: The goal of the book is to give you a sol­id con­cep­tu­al under­stand­ing of SAP S/4HANA archi­tec­ture, includ­ing its main com­po­nents with their func­tions, data, and interactions.

You get a holis­tic tech­ni­cal overview of the SAP S/4HANA tech­nol­o­gy from dif­fer­ent angles, includ­ing archi­tec­ture prin­ci­ples, tech­ni­cal foun­da­tion, appli­ca­tions, and cloud operations. 

With this con­cep­tu­al under­stand­ing, you can make bet­ter tech­ni­cal deci­sions, and you get a great start­ing point for fur­ther learn­ing and explor­ing the dif­fer­ent components.

Learn more about oth­er SAP Press books here.