5 Incredible Resources For Learning to Program Salesforce

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Salesforce is an incredibly large and customizable platform with hundreds of different features. Learning to use Salesforce can be difficult, but learning to program and manage Salesforce is even more daunting. Below I’ve provided you with the best resources I could find on programming Salesforce.  Before jumping into learning to program apex, I recommend you register for a demo org and watch a few of the different product demos.

When I started learning how to use Salesforce Apex in 2013, I was amazed at the hundreds of different online resources available. Literally, there are thousands of different sites. Over the last two years, I’m sure there’s been even more resources. Salesforce has developed its own “learning portal”, and there’s been a few new books that have come out.

SFDC99

One site, in particular really stood out to me which was SALESFORCE CODING LESSONS FOR THE 99%. David has written very good and detailed tutorials that anyone should be able to follow and implement. I understand that David lead some great sessions at Dreamforce 2014; I wasn’t able to attend any of them though.

Trailhead

At Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce introduced Trailhead. A while after Dreamforce, I wrote a post about my thoughts on Trailhead. Trailhead is an incredible resource that I wish was around when I had first started using Salesforce. Over the last year, it’s really exploded and now offering a ton of different paths to learning about Salesforce.

Bob Buzzard Blog

No list would be complete without the Bob Buzzard blog. Keir has written dozens of blog articles that I have bookmarked about different Salesforce topics. His posts are primarily about visualforce and apex, although he has started writing quite a bit about Salesforce Lightning and Trailhead. He’s also written a book about visualforce and led some great sessions at Dreamforce. I believe right now Keir has almost all of the Salesforce Certifications.

OyeCode

Harshit Pandey previously worked at Salesforce as a Technical Architect. He has some incredibly basic blog articles, and some incredibly technical articles as well. One of my favourite series so far is his section on Salesforce Technical Architect Best Practices.

Jeff Douglas Blog

Prior to becoming a Salesforce Employee Jeff wrote some incredible posts about apex and visualforce. One of my favourite posts is his post about having “Fun With Salesforce Collections“.

Additional Salesforce Training Resources

  • Force Platform Fundamentals is Salesforce’s introduction to the Force.com Platform. There’s quite a bit of discussion about building metadata (creating objects, fields, custom workflows, approval process), security, and reporting. Overall, it’s pretty good but also very daunting. The pdf has about 400 pages.
  • Visualforce Developers Guide is pretty much a must for any developer that will develop pages in Salesforce.
  • Apex Workbook covers a lot about the syntax, fundamentals, and limits the Salesforce have placed in the language and on the platform.
  • Salesforce University provides some in person and online training. I haven’t taken any of the training, but it seems like it could be pretty good based on some of the Hands on Training I’ve done at Dreamforce. Prices also seem to be pretty high, and in US Dollars
  • On Youtube, there’s a lot of different Dreamforce Presentations many of which are very good and still pretty relevant.
  • Also review my blog article about about Using jQuery with Visualforce.

Also published on Medium.

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Brian is a software architect and technology leader living in Niagara Falls with 13+ years of development experience. He is passionate about automation, business process re-engineering, and building a better tomorrow.

Brian is a proud father of four: two boys, and two girls and has been happily married to Crystal for more than ten years. From time to time, Brian may post about his faith, his family, and definitely about technology.