1500 Trailhead Badges
I’ve reached the milestone of 1500 Trailhead badges. This should represent the half way point to the next major milestone of 3xAll Star Ranger. But as we’ll see I’m not quite there yet and it’s looking like reaching that milestone will be a bit harder than the first 2 All Star Ranger ranks was.
So, what’s the issue. Well as you can see I’ve overshot the 1500 badges slightly - I’m at 1504. However to be half way to 3xAll Star I’d need to be at 750,000 points. But I’m slightly under 740,000. Somewhere around 1400 badges I reached an inflection point. Up to there I was consistently above the 500 points per badge average required to keep track with the ranking system. However as I’ve completed so many badges on Trailhead now I am finding it harder to find badge I am interested in completing that score 500 points or above.
This is compounded by the fact that most new badges are worth under 500 badges. Let’s take a look at the last 10 new badges (which I’m working through completing)
Out of these badges only 1 is worth over 500 points. They average 310 points only. Not nearly enough to keep that all important 500 point average. I currently expect I’ll need to get to over 1900 badges to actually reach the required 900,000 points for 3xAll Star. Which is the vast majority of the remaining badges available in Trailhead today!
Salesforce Certified Integration Architect
A few days before the start of my Christmas break I sat the Salesforce Certified Integration Architect exam. This was the last exam for the year and the last I required to obtain the System Architect Certification. As my title was previous Technical Architect - Integrations I hoped I’d not find this one too hard.
I completed the Trailmix and purchased both the course and practice exams from Focus on Force. I was getting very high marks on the FoF practice exams so felt that this, coupled with my previous experience, and the overlap from the previous Architect exams meant this should be a fairly easy exam.
However almost as soon as I started I realised it wasn’t going to be the gentle ease into my break I was expecting. The questions were long and involved, some with diagrams. They were quite different to the FoF example questions and to the previous Architect exams. This seemed to be much more applied knowledge and problem solving than straight knowledge. Some of the questions appeared to have two correct answers (although only only one could be selected). I soldiered on and obtained this result.
Definitely closer than I’d like. You need to answer 40 questions correctly. So I had 4 spare but to only get half of the questions correct in a section is really not great. But a pass is a pass!
This of course also means I obtained the Certified System Architect taking me to 15 Certifications in total, 12 this year. A fitting end to my year of certification
Salesforce Certified AI Specialist
Months ago now (I totally forgot I had not posted this) I sat, and passed the relatively new AI Specialist Certification. Unusually I sat this in person (at Dreamforce). This exam was free at Dreamforce and is now, until the end of 2025, free for anyone to sit.
As a very new certification (when I sat this it had been available for about a month) there were no study guides, practice exams and the like available. I think that may have changed by now. However I did not think this was a particularly hard exam to pass. At least for me I’d done a lot of work in Prompt Builder and Agent Builder in the run up to Dreamforce so was in a good place to sit this exam. If you’ve not been working in this area the you’ll find the Trailhead is pretty good.
So I’ve already said I passed, but how did I do?
So that was a pretty solid pass. The pass rate is a reasonably high 73% on this exam. But I exceeded that comfortably (by about 11 correct answers). So that’s great. As you can see I had one section I was not too hot on - what the various Salesforce provided AI tools and features are. I’m not super interested in them so this is no surprise!
This was a quick exam for me: 19 minutes. So about 20 seconds a question.
This was, for me, a nice easy one to break up the Architect Certifications. Which I’ll be back to real soon…
Dreamforce '24: Day-1
Today was the first day of Dreamforce. I don’t think I was prepared for just how massive, busy and overwhelming Dreamforce is. At TDX turning up 30 minutes before the keynote is fine. At Dreamforce you’re in an overflow viewing situation with pretty poor streaming in an other building! We’ll get to that. But before that the most important thing: the swag. Gone are the days of a fancy backpack. Now you’ve got to complete the quest to get a recycled cotton tote. Here’s my Day 1 haul
I started the day at 8:30 with the Build Innovative ISV Apps with Agentforce. I mostly did this to meet people I’d only ever talked to online in person. I didn’t learn much about building apps - I’ve already done this for real. However the forward looking roadmap and the conversations after the session were incredibly valuable.
This session ended 30 minutes before the keynote. By the time I got out of the session (which was not in the Moscone Center buildings) and down the street to the Moscone Center the main keynote room was full as were most of the overflows. The overflows were suffering from poor streaming. I watched some of the keynote then ditched it to go down to the main Trailblazer forest and knock out some of the activities there. Hopefully my best time will stand and I’ll get some cool prizes. I am not ashamed to say I did the beginner level just to post a fast time for the swag!
During the afternoon I attended various Agentforce sessions. I’d say nothing particularly interesting was shown. Certainly the detail around other channels, proactivity and the more advanced features was not yet revealed.
I also had a very interesting discussion about Data Cloud One at the booth. This really seems like a bit of a gamechanger for multi-org Data Cloud bringing all the functionality that has been made available on the home Data Cloud org to other connected orgs.
I’m sure I could write more but I’ll leave you with some more pictures from around Dreamforce
Dreamforce '24: Day-0
It’s the day before Dreamforce. I’m in San Francisco and the sun is trying to shine. Amazingly for a work trip I have relatively little to do and can enjoy the day 🙂
Happily by arriving at the hotel quite late on the previous day I was able to sleep. Not as much or as well as I’d like but starting the day with 6 hours sleep at more or less the correct time is a great way to start getting over that 8 hour time difference. However with the hotel charging almost $40 for the breakfast buffet (and it not being included despite the ridiculous room rate) I thought I’d head out to get something.
A short walk around the Ferry Terminal and there were some choices but I settled for Boudin bakery. Despite the fame for Sourdough their breakfast menu did not have any! I settled on the breakfast burrito. But no coffee as they don’t serve decaf! It was fine, certainly filling but they don’t open early enough for tomorrow so I’ll be trying somewhere else.
After a brief return to the hotel I headed out on my “California pilgrimage” to get an In-N-Out burger. It’s about a 40 minute walk round to Fisherman’s Wharf to work up an appetite. I got to In-N-Out at about 11:45 and got my double-double animal style, fries and strawberry milkshake just before the queue got insane. Delicious!
After that I met up with some fellow Trailblazers to walk the Golden Gate Bridge. I had crossed a couple of years back on a double decker bus so knew to expect the wind (actually not too bad) but had not really anticipated the road noise. Still it was a good walk and great conversation.
Then Uber back into town to collect my conference badge. With Express Badge it was super fast. Quick face scan to match with my previously supplied selfie, flash of government ID and it was mine with a strong warning to not lose it as it’s $150 to replace!
To round out the day I headed over to Fogo to hear the wonderful Joe Thomas talk about AI and Analytics and have a few drinks.
Dreamforce '24 : Day -1
Day -1, or two days before Dreamforce, saw me travelling to San Francisco. I live in the lovely spa town of Harrogate in the north of England. Which is a great place to live but not exactly well connected! So my plans were: Taxi to LBA, fly LBA->AMS, AMS->JFK, JFK->SFO then Uber to the hotel. All in all I expected this to take something about 22 hours.
And so it was. I arrived pretty much as expected! I am writing this from my room in the Hyatt Regency (very nice) overlooking the Ferry Terminal building in SF. Despite my first plane being late enough that I though I would miss the connection, immigration in JFK taking 45 minutes then a farcical situation where they let us queue for security only to decide we then need to be two floors down and having to gate check my bag I made it pretty much on time.
I have a day to get over the jetlag and prepare myself mentally for Dreamforce. More on that in my next post. I’ll leave you with some terrible pictures
Dreamforce '24 Plans and Schedule
Dreamforce is fast approaching. The Agenda Builder has been live for a week or so. The session list is overwhelming! I also have the added challenge of speaking slots that are non-negotiable blocks. And of course there is Dreamfest too!
Let’s start with my speaking slots. I am speaking 3 times on Wednesday (and then relaxing at Dreamfest!). Here are the times and locations if you want to come see me speak. If you are hoping to grab me for a chat that’s cool but perhaps not after the second session as I’ll be running (quite possibly literally) to the next one
Wednesday 18th, 09:00-09:20 - 5 Strategies to Make Your Business AI-Ready with AppExchange - Moscone West, L1 Forest, AppExchange Theater
Wednesday 18th 15:30-15:50 - 5 Strategies to Make Your Business AI-Ready with AppExchange - Moscone South, LL, Content Pavilion, Stage 7
Wednesday 18th, 16:00-16:20 - An ISV Story: How Certinia Is Building Scale in Its ALM - Moscone West, L1 Forest, AppExchange Theater
If you’re not coming to Dreamforce then you can also look forward to the second running of the “5 Strategies” session coming to Salesforce +!
Mostly my schedule is packed with Gen AI, Agentforce and Data Cloud sessions. Agent Force is clearly going to be the main topic of Dreamforce and I’ll be in about 7 sessions on this trying to gain as much knowledge as possible. But there’s still time for the perennial favourites of keynotes, True to the Core and general developer topics
I’ll also be sitting the AI Specialist certification and will report back after the fact on that one.
2xAll Star Ranger
This is a bit of a made-up achievement but I’m still proud to have reached it. The Trailhead ranks top out at All Star Ranger (600 badges and 300,000 points). I have now got double the requirements for All Star Ranger. So thats 2xAll Star Ranger!
Whilst most people who use Trailhead won’t get close to this number of badges I’d encourage people to do as many badges as possible. I’ve learnt so much in reaching this level. It’s taken a bit less than four years to get this far. However there is still much to learn.
SuperQBit tells me that there are plenty of people out there on many more badges and points (well over 2000 badges and 1,000,000 points). So that’s something for me to aim for!
Dreamforce 2024
I am incredibly excited to be able to say this year I am attending Dreamforce. And more than that I’ll be speaking!
Right now I am speaking in a single session: An ISV Story: How Certinia Is Building Scale in Its ALM. The agenda is still being settled so I can’t say which day this is on or even too much about the session other than it should involved Scale Center and Apex Guru.
I am hoping for additional speaking opportunities around Gen AI, Copilot and Data Cloud but even if I only have one session it’s incredibly exciting. If you are going to Dreamforce I might see you there!
Salesforce Certified Development Lifecycle and Deployment Architect
Last Friday I sat (and passed) this certification exam. I’ve got a goal for the end of the year and the summer season seemed like it might get in the way so I brought this forward into July (making it two certifications in a month). Let’s see how I did…
I can see how this exam could trip people up. If you’ve just leaned Salesforce then this is a bit of a change of pace. What is ALM? Hoe does it impact Salesforce development. What are all these different development (and deployment) methodologies? What is Waterfall?
However if you’ve been in the technology space for some time (in my case almost 25 years) you’ll have seen much of this already. You’ll maybe have had to try and enforce ALM strategies. Certainly you’ll have experienced the Waterfall to Agile transition first hand. So these parts won’t be too hard.
However what about the rest. Let’s see how I did…
So as expected the general technology areas were pretty good. But the Salesforce specific parts were a bit worse. Actually below the pass mark. Overall it was just ok. I scored the exact pass mark! Looking back at the questions I am pretty sure the ones I got wrong where mostly those with 3 correct answers. Two were dead certs and the third could be one of two. I struggled with these in the practice exams and feel I probably struggled with them here too.
Speaking of practice exams I feel the Focus On Force practice exams where particularly good here. Many of the final exam questions were pretty much exactly what was in the practice exam.
It’ll probably be a couple of months until the next certification exam so I hope to write about something else soon
Salesforce Certified MuleSoft Associate
After the focussed set of certifications to achieve the Application Architect certification I wanted to do something different, and perhaps a bit easier, before tackling the three further certifications required for the System Architect cert. Salesforce have been quietly expanding the Associate offerings. I already had two but there were two more available. I decided on the MuleSoft one as that is something I really thought I should know more about. Let’s see how I got on.
I found both the Salesforce Associate and AI Associate certifications pretty easy. I’ve been using the platform pretty much every day for 3 years so the first was basically just stuff I knew. I’d done all the AI trailheads and have a degree that was 50% AI from 20+ years ago. So the AI one was fine. But I’ve barely even seen MuleSoft!
The Certificate is about 50% the philosophy of MuleSoft and the approach they want to take to enterprise development. I found this pretty interesting. But I did actually need to study and think about what the material was saying about organisational alignment and structure. A lot of what it said really hit home with me. I’ve seen the disfunction of a very large enterprise building huge monolithic apps first hand!
The other 50% is mostly a very high level overview of the MuleSoft platform and how it delivers on the approach and philosophy. There is no hands-on element. Just learning the main building blocks and what they are used for. A general knowledge of API terms and patterns is helpful here. Especially REST APIs and how they work.
The pass mark for this exam is 70%. As you can see I was comfortably above this with a couple of weeks studying. I’m sure my integration experience helped here but you can definitely go from next to no Mule knowledge to passing this (and gaining that Mule basic knowledge) pretty easily. Allowing for the section weightings in the exam I scored about 87%.
I’d recommend this certification for anyone with a bit of curiosity about the Mule platform. Or anyone just wanting to increase the number of certifications they hold!
Certified Platform Developer 1
I actually passed this certification a few weeks back and forgot to post! This was my fifth Certification of the year, 8th overall and one that I was pretty confident I could pass before I even started studying for it.
I had both a book and Focus on Force to ensure I passed this one. I used both mostly because I rarely use Visual Force or Aura, both already being old hat by the time I started on the platform. However both are covered in the exam and I wanted coverage of these. I still pretty much hate both after studying for this. LWC is so much better!
Once again I was doing really well with the FoF practice exams. But how did that translate to the real exam this time?
Never in doubt! The sub-80% sections are a bit disappointing but 100% for Developer Fundamentals is great and the study focus on VF and Aura clearly paid off. All in all a good pass.
This also completed my Application Architect certification. Moving me to six certifications for the year and nine overall. Hopefully there are still some more to come!
Certified Sharing and Visibility Architect
How did I do in my latest Certification exam?
Another month, another Certification! The Year of Certification is going really well. That makes four in four months this year, five months in a row if I include December last year. That’s also 3/4 of the Certifications for the Certified Application Architect done with only Platform Builder 1 to go.
This time round I didn’t have a book to guide me. This is a topic that I didn’t feel I had as much experience and confidence in so I wanted something more than the Trailhead guide. So I purchased the Focus on Force guide and practice exams ($48). Considering I was getting a $400 (+tax) exam for free through a Partner Voucher this seemed a reasonable investment.
I spent quite some time going through the guide, the section exams then the two practice exams. I did them more than once and was scoring 90%+. So when I sat down I was pretty confident. The pass mark for this exam is a relatively high 67% but I wasn’t worried as I was doing so well in the practice exams. So how did I do?
I passed! As is becoming pretty standard I took about half an hour completing one question every 30 seconds or so. Pretty fast, much faster than required but it works for me. If we weight the above section percentages by the section weightings that equates to a little under 74%. I had expected better based on the practice exams but there we go.
As the above shows I had three good sections and one terrible one. Luckily for me that is the section with the lowest weighting in the exam. So what went well? Clearly I learned a lot about the important parts. I felt very confident about the standard access controls and the implications.
However the Access to other Data section was clearly a disaster. I didn’t feel that the FoF practice exams and questions really prepared me for this well. There was very little on Content Delivery for example. And my mind basically went blank on the different types of Experience Cloud licenses. And there were multiple questions on that. I even went back and doubled down in one case reasoning if I answered one question one way I had to alter a very similar question to match. I think I got both wrong so should have spread my bets!
Anyway on to PD1
Certified Data Architect
Another Certification down. How do I feel about the Data Architect cert exam?
The “Year of Certification” continues. Third month, third Certification. And my 5th Certification in the past 6 months (shame I didn’t do one last November!) This one seemed to follow on nicely from the Certified Data Cloud Consultant. And indeed there is a little overlap.
As per usual I was ready to start the exam 10 minutes early. The authentication process is now second nature (I know where I have a blank enough bit of wall for the photo part to work). I had done some practice questions and scored around 73%. Way better than the required 58%. So I was feeling pretty good.
As soon as the first question came up it confirmed what I already knew. This is a more scenario and problem solving based exam than the previous straight knowledge based ones. And that makes sense. An architect is all about problem solving. So the questions have some context. They might need to explain the objects that exist, the business process being followed or the competing requirements. If you are going to sit this then definitely be prepared to read more and think more about the questions.
Despite the additional detail in the question I still dook about my usual amount of time. As per previous exams I completed this one using about 30 seconds per question. I felt I was slower than this. I was intentionally reading each question twice and making sure I considered all the answers. So I’m not sure why I was so fast. My advice is definitely to not go for speed! There are no bonus points for speed available!
Overall I’m not too unhappy with the results. If you multiply the area percentages by the coverage in the exam guide that works out as about 70%. Clearly a good margin of comfort over the 58% pass mark but still plenty of room to improve! The Data Migration part clearly caught me a bit. I think I was too caught up with using ETL tools rather than Salesforce ones. I still think in many cases those might be a good idea!
Data Migration is something I’ve not done too much of on the platform so it makes sense that I was weaker here. I’m not sure how relevant this will be in future exams but I thought I had studied up. Clearly not well enough!
I was using another book from my Packt bundle which is looking like increasingly good value! I’ll review that in another post.
One Thousand (and One) Badges
At the start of the year I set a goal of reaching 1000 badges on Trailhead this year. That was always going to happen. But to do it in the first quarter is a bit of a surprise, I did find the hundred-odd badges I needed that fitted me well.
I had meant to make this post on exactly 1000 badges. Obviously. But one of those pesky community badges from completing a quest snuck in!
This sort of number of badges leaves me on about 465 on SuperQBit and just outside the top 200 on points. So plenty of people out there who have done a whole lot more. More than twice as many in a few cases!
I’m not setting any particular target for the rest of the year. I’m probably going to focus more on completing the last few Superbadges and Certifications
Finding Out What a Trailhead Hands-on Test is Doing
I recently completed the Apex Web Services Superbadge Unit. During this I was finding the specification of the API that I was meant to be building somewhat lacking in detail. It was not particularly clear on exactly what it wanted to be returned. As the tests failed over and over I thought to myself “wouldn’t it be easier if I could see what was being tested”. Turns out you can.
This will work for any if the hands-on tests in Trailhead where Trailhead executes Apex to drive the test. Not all tests do this. Some simply interact with records using the API. However if Apex is being executed we can capture that. To do so go to Setup and search for Debug. Go to Debug logs and add a User Debug for your user. Run the test again.
Take a look at the logs (reload the logs page). You’ll see an operation at something like “services/data/v30.0/tooling/executeAnonymous/”. Maybe a few in a row if a few tests executed one after another. Open the one that failed and at the top you’ll see the Apex that was run. Something like this (this is from the Get Started with Apex unit):
Execute Anonymous: List<String> strings = StringArrayTest.generateStringArray(10); System.assertEquals(strings.size(),10); System.assertEquals(strings[0],'Test 0');Now you know what it’s doing it’s easier to write your code to actually do what it wants. Note this is a terrible test. You can write code that does not meet the required specifications and pass this unit. Even better for the Superbadge unit I mentioned: they also want test classes. Take the various tests the unit performs and you’ve basically got your test class written!
Lightning Web Components Specialist
A few post back I was talking about how some Superbadges were more super than others and the differences between modern and older Superbadges. In this post I said that I was avoiding the LWC Web Components Specialist due to its intimidating length. Well I finally knuckled down and competed it
This Superbadges is really part of the Certification system (yes I know they call claim to be but most are not). It forms part of the Certified JavaScript Developer 1 Certification. As such it’s both reasonable to expect it to be quite tough and also pretty hard for Salesforce to dramatically change this badge. So this is a pretty old-school Superbadge. It definitely earns it super title!
At 16,000 points this has to be one of then highest value badges in Trailhead. There are a massive 18 assessed steps to complete. They start off reasonably varied but it soon becomes quite repetitive. You will need to authenticate VS Code with your special DE Org and pull at least one LWC to edit. Quite why this pattern was not repeated is not clear. For the next quite a few steps you have to create a LWC and copy and paste the template HTML, JS and sometimes CSS into your new LWC.
All of the LWC creation is very similar. Read the (out of order) specifications, add the various properly configured components where the HTML comments indicate. Generally this part was pretty simple. The. Update the JS replacing the comments with real code. I found this harder. Not because the JS was hard , it’s not. But because the specifications seemed quite vague in places and the checks demand you do it exactly as they expect. Of course there are many ways to achieve the same results but you have to do it exactly as they want
At the end when you put it all together I was surprised that my LWCs that had passed all the checks failed on an actual page. I was even more surprised that this then passed the final checks: as long as the correct components were on the correct page in the correct place it didn’t matter whether they actually worked!
Maybe I’ll get round to the exam one day
Certified Data Cloud Consultant
How did I get on with one of the most recent Salesforce Certifications. What are my recommendations for studying for this certification
The “Year of Certification” rolls on into its second month. And I passed my second Certification exam of the year! I’ve been doing a lot of learning and exploring with Data Cloud so I expected to be in a good place to pass this exam with a little extra study. So how did it go?
I’m getting pretty familiar and comfortable with the exam process now. I know it’ll take a few minutes to do the biometric authentication and get the exam up. So I don’t worry about how long that’s taking. I know the Launch button will appear 10 minutes before. So I launch 10 minutes early. And I know to not get worried no matter how it feels as I am answering the questions - more on that in a bit
I had studied up for this exam. To start with I completed the Partner Learning Camp curriculum. The non-hands on parts of this have now been migrated to the preparatory Trail Mix so anyone can access them. If you have access to the PLC definitely go and do the hands on available there as this will teach you so much more. I had also built my own little study guide as I went pulling in material from Salesforce help. I used that in the last few days running up to the exam.
In the end I used about my normal time: a little under 30 seconds per question. I would recommend sitting these exams at your own pace. They are not a sprint! You don’t get extra marks for being quick. However I generally know the answer or have a good educated guess and spending longer won’t change that. I do make sure I read the question twice to make sure I’ve fully understood it. This exam was also the first time in a Salesforce Certification exam that I’ve used the Review feature to come back to a question later.
The exam transcript shows quite a wide variation in scores for each topic. The pass mark for the exam is 62%. So I’m happy I scored at least that in each section. Given the section weightings the above equates to about 78%. Not bad (and comfortably above the pass rate) but not that amazing. The 100% section is good though!
That said at the end of the exam I was mostly just happy (and a bit relieved) to have passed. I was not feeling particularly happy about quite a few questions and more often than I’d like I felt like I was taking educated guesses. Not completely blind random guesses but I was definitely not sure.
In terms of areas for me to improve and areas I feel the Trail Mix does not cover well:
Right to Be Forgotten
B2C Integration
Marketing Cloud Integration
S3/Cloud Activation
If you are thinking of sitting this study on on those areas! For me the “Year of Certification” rolls on. I think my next exam (maybe a couple of months away) will be an Architect one.
Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification Guide - A Book Review
Is the Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification Guide from Packt any good?
As I said in a previous post I recently sat (and passed) the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder Exam. One of the tools I used to prepare for this exam was the Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification Guide from Packt. This is another book I got as part of a Humble Bundle deal. As such this review is somewhat coloured by the price I paid for this book in PDF form: about £1.
Probably the most important question to ask about this book is “will this help me pass the exam”. This is a pretty simple one - yes. I’m pretty sure I’d have passed the exam without the book but it was certainly easier with a guide to the exam, the additional example questions and the breakdown of the sections. There is nothing in the book that you could not get from the help documentation or Trailhead but having the important parts condensed down into a few hundred pages makes it easier to study and revise.
Having said a few hundred pages it’s probably worth mentioning the length. In the edition I had there are 389 pages. There are quite a few pages advertising another book at the end, index etc but there must be a solid 350 pages of content. This is not a book you can just consume the night before the exam to pass! You need a week or two to get the most from the book.
As a primarily programmatic developer the book helps show the clicks-not-code platform that this exam tests. The book presents a scenario that is woven through the chapters which you can build as you go in your own org. Personally I did not do that - the projects in Trailhead were enough. However I can see this being helpful if you had the time to follow along.
I’m not sure I could recommend the book at full price - you can pass the exam without it. But at a reduced price it’s probably worth it for the additional confidence it gives
Mastering Apex Programming - A Book Review
My review of the book “Mastering Apex Programming”
Some time in 2023 there was an amazing deal on Humble Bundle for a set of Salesforce related books. 20 books for a minimum payment of $30 (or something about that amount). Whilst I wasn’t really desperate for a whole lot of Salesforce books to read it was too good a deal to pass up so I purchased the “The Salesforce CRM Certification Bundle”. As I did not have any Salesforce Certifications (discounting the Slack Developer Certification I got in 2022) at least a few of the books might be helpful.
The first book I decided to read was not one of the Certification guides but a book titled “Mastering Apex Programming”. I’d consider myself a pretty good Apex programmer but I am mindful I came to Apex from Java (and a whole lot of other languages) and may have brought some bad practices with me. There might also be some interesting language features or edge cases the book might teach me about. I actually finished the book some months back and have been meaning to write a short review ever since.
Overall I think this is an OK book. It’s not amazing but it’s certainly not terrible and offers sound advice and guidance. It places it covers a little more than just Apex programming occasionally expanding to cover client management and interactions. This may be appropriate for some Apex developers (those in consulting roles) but less relevant for those working for ISVs.
The book is in 3 main sections. The first “Triggers, Testing and Security” really covers the bread and butter basics of what Apex is used for. Apex was originally a trigger language so it makes sense to cover this most core of use cases first and use it as a tool to look at the most common mistakes that are made in Apex development such as DML in loops as well as how to debug your code, make it secure and an outline of a trigger framework. This section is pretty good and as far as I am aware still up to date.
However there is one glaring omission in the security section. User Mode SOQL/DML is not covered. This is relatively recent and highlights the issue with using books, which are a point-in-time reference, to try and learn an constantly evolving platform. User Mode SOQL/DML makes a lot of the discussion of CRUD and FLS checks unnecessary and really simplifies an Apex developers life.
Query with binds which is even more recent is also not mentioned in the preventing SOQL injection attacks section. Again this should be the go-to for developers and not having it in the book makes it feel dated.
The second section is on Asynchronous Apex and Apex REST. Quite why these two are lumped together is not entirely clear. Perhaps it’s because one common use case of async Apex is making callouts so it made sense to cover the other side of that coin. This section feels old. Really it should recommend that all new async code is written using Queueables and discuss a Queueable framework in the same way that it discusses a Trigger framework. Queueables are now the clear answer to almost all async programming on the platform (and once serializable Query Cursors are released the last reasons to use Batch Apex will go away).
The book is missing and discussion of Queueable Finalizers. This is unforgivable. Finalizers are what make Queueables the best option for async. Without them it is impossible to write truly predictable async code that can handle failure gracefully. I think this is the biggest issue with the whole book. There is no way you have “mastered” Apex Programming without knowing about these.
Similarly to the missing items above it also does not mention AsyncOptions. These are only a few released old so this is not surprising. However these really make async with Queueables so much better.
The final section is on Apex performance. I had no real issues with this. I guess performance profiling and improving performance have not changed much for a number of years. It would have been nice to mention the Certinia Log Analyser which can make performance analysis so much easier. And there was no mention of cold start problems and how to avoid them which was disappointing.
So all in all an OK book that is starting to show it’s age. No real errors, just missing things of various levels of importance.
Most likely my next book review from this bundle will be the “Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification Guide” as I intend writing this exam soon.