While the book is of formidable heft, if you take the approach of reading it and focusing on the roles, then any relevance to your company might be clearer. Each role is a type of user within a company. The developers tried to factor out these most common types across most companies. The view through roles is considered an improvement. Earlier, accessing NAV showed the myriad functionalities available. This proved to be confusing, in no small part because of the sheer number of these. Now, the role based view is a refactoring that makes the abilities be confined to within a given role. Quicker for a new user to understand what she can do. The current 2013 version is also promoted by the text as more customisable than its predecessors. Microsoft migrated 2013 to a 3 layer architecture. The bottom being a SQL Server (naturally!) that holds the data. The middle is a NAV server. While the top are various clients, that connect via a web interface. You may also want to quick scan the brief summary of the product's history. The antecedants go prior to 2002, when the product was bought by Microsoft from another firm. Chapter 2 is all about the deltas. What is new in 2013 and what is no longer supported. Probably you might just treat this as a reference chapter. Quickly skim it and then later go back to it if necessary. Chapter 4 is really where the meat of the text starts. It acknowledges the reality that each firm is different and unique. That you need to implement NAV specifically for the needs of that firm. Really non-trivial. This and chapter 5 may well be the key sections for you to focus on. Whereas chapters 6, about migrating data, and 7, about upgrading to 2013, are more mundane; about back compatibility or lack thereof. In an alternate formulation of the book, chapters 2, 6 and 7 could have been grouped together under this theme.