Preview: First Apex Academy video course!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, students!

It has been an especially memorable holiday season for me this year =)

I’m proud to say that after hundreds of hours designing, drawing, tweaking, and coding by me and my editing team… we’re wrapping up the first two-hour course and getting ready to launch it!

You’re going to find that this course takes a different approach to teaching you Apex than my existing tutorials do. I read all the feedback from the thousands of comments, emails, and questions I’ve received throughout the years. I took an honest look at the shortcomings of my existing tutorials, and made sure to design a new, stronger course – without losing the SFDC99 humor and magic.

So what’s the difference between the Apex Academy course and existing content?

• The magic of a video and voice classroom lets me teach things that would normally be too ambitious to cover in written lessons
• We write A TON of triggers and test classes to make sure the concepts stick!
• Everything is taught in the context of actual scenarios you’d see in a Salesforce deployment
• The overall pace favors depth and understanding instead of speed and conciseness
• You no longer need to supplement your learning with books such as Head First Java

Needless to say, I poured in the hours to make sure this course exceeds my standards!

Here’s a sneak peek at the first course content!

Apex Academy: Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Coding in Salesforce

Module 1: What’s in it for me?
– Five things you didn’t know Apex would do for your career
– Job prospects for new Salesforce developers
– Can anyone really learn how to code?

Module 2: Introduction to Apex
– Apex and the Salesforce automation landscape
– When to code and when not to code
– What is an Apex trigger and how do they work?
– Comparison of coding editors
– Installing the MavensMate coding editor

Module 3: Writing Basic Apex Triggers
– Write 5 different Apex triggers and analyze them line by line
– The trigger loop: what it is and why we need it
– Timeline of a trigger within a database event
– When to use “before” vs “after” triggers
– Two examples of bad triggers, and how to fix them
– The general trigger pattern
– Homework!

Module 4: Writing Test Classes
– What are test classes and why does Salesforce want you to write them?
– Why should YOU focus on test classes?
– Test class requirements
– How to write 3 different test classes
– How Salesforce calculates your test coverage, and how you can increase it
– What NOT to do when writing test classes
– Homework!

Module 5: Deploying Code
– How to deploy from sandbox to production

This course is going to give you a rock solid foundation of coding in Salesforce and I recommend it even to people who’ve gone through all the tutorials on this site. It’s one thing to read tutorials and it’s a whole other thing to understand the concepts within them. This course makes sure you understand what you’re doing, and, it’ll get you started towards the Platform Developer I and II certifications.

Soon, I start designing course #2! Updates coming soon as well as an official launch for course #1!

David