Regardless of the method used for deployment, the goal is to move your changes from your development sandbox to production. For smaller code changes, a single class and its tests, or for declarative metadata, such as page layouts and object additions, I prefer the public audit trail provided by change sets. On the other hand, if I'm deploying an entire features' worth of code and tests, I almost always go for an IDE or Ant deployment. And if there's more than one developer deploying metadata, I always automate the process with a continuous integration tool with Ant. Remember that the only way to remove metadata from a production org is through the Ant toolkit or the Force.com IDE. This is reason enough to learn the pointy details of the ant toolkit's XML files.

In the next chapter, we'll dive into using APIs to build integrations into and out of Salesforce. Integrations require extensive testing, but can ultimately provide your Salesforce org with quick, efficient, and powerful methods of manipulating data.