I am lucky enough to have had the opportunity to take some Salesforce Developer training this week. I attended Programmatic Development Using Apex and Visualforce (DEV-450) here in London, a 5 day course intended to teach the fundamentals of Apex and Visualforce to developers.
As someone who has worked with Salesforce for the better part of 6 years, I was excited to take the next step in my developer career path. My instructor, Simon Goodyear, was a Salesforce MVP and really knew his stuff. Did I expect anything different? No. But it was really nice to have someone who you could ask anything and was able to give a coherent, informed and easy to understand answer.
The content of the course was largely as described in the title focusing on Apex and Visualforce for development. The first half day covered a lot of platform fundamentals around sharing, security and declarative automation tools. I’ve spent lots of time on these topics in my various roles and felt the brief touch on them was appropriately short for my needs.
Though much of what we covered throughout the rest of the week are topics that I have a an understanding of, I never felt like I was wasting time. We talked a fair amount about object relationships for example and though they are fundamental part of working in the Salefsforce ecosystem and something I use on a daily basis, I feel I strengthened and solidified my grasp on some of the finer points. This wasn’t unique to relationships. Generally speaking as the week went on, I knew less and less of what we were learning. As such, I think the advances in my Visualforce knowledge, which we didn’t get to until Thursday and Friday, will be broader than that what we worked on earlier in the week like relationships but perhaps not as deep.
I am excited to take the Salesforce Platform Developer I certification in the next few weeks. Though not advertised explicitly as such, this course is intended to cover a lot of what one will see in that certification and after discussing with my instructor, I feel ready to tackle the cert! For those who don’t have much general development experience, this was certainly a fast moving course and could possibly pass some by. I have varied development experience in Ruby and VBA. Along with my extensive Salesforce administrator experience, I feel I was an ideal candidate to take this course.
Stay tuned for my next post where I dive in to a little more detail about the content of the course.