Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification Guide - A Book Review

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

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.