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# Developer Study Guide: Get Started

Being a Salesforce developer is, for lack of a better word, cool. You not only create magic through apps and customizing implementations, but do it in a way that scales to thousands of users at no additional development cost.

There are significant benefits for being a Salesforce developer -

  • No-code and low-code technologies are the future. Salesforce is a pioneer and leader in the space and enjoys trust by thousands of companies
  • SFDC is changing for the better and improving all the time. Developers get opportunities to learn new skills and deliver better business value for their applications
  • Develop skills to focus on business problems and deploy the right mix of configuration and customisation options
  • Focus on application not on infrastructure

# What it means to be a developer?

As a developer you decide how your organisation gets to maximise benefit from salesforce implementation.

You -

  • explore configuration (clicks to change application behaviour)
  • are not afraid to use code to change application behaviour - i.e., what we call "customisation"
  • integrate other salesforce applications or non-salesforce systems
  • use or create Salesforce apps
  • and.. anything in between. You don't quite stop at nothing - it may be the different clouds of salesforce, various industries, numerous AppExchange apps, or even developing an app to call your customers to wish on their birthday.

Well, we probably lie about "not stopping at nothing". You will still be subject to limitations of the physical realm and the boundaries of oort cloud. But, you get the idea.

Some good places for you to go and find out more about the career path -

# Pre-requisites

You can go over this guide at all skill-levels, but we strongly recommend a working knowledge of salesforce. Did we hear you ask about the best place to get those skills? Well, this is your day - we have a admin study guide that can get you acquainted enough with salesforce to get started on this guide.

Ideally you should -

  1. Have an ability to navigate through salesforce and understand application concepts
  2. Be familiar with salesforce configuration
  3. Have the tenacity to put in the hours towards becoming a developer

From a system perspective, you should have -

  1. a computer laptop/desktop with stable internet connection and standards compliant browser
  2. Visual Studio Code with Salesforce extension
  3. enough water to help you stay hydrated

# Objective

The objective of this course is to outline Salesforce capabilities that you need to know to become a developer, take you through the "initial learning" to get you familiar enough to explore further, and leave you with things to explore and "do" to enhance your practical knowledge. Since Platform Developer I Certification (PD1) is a quantifiable measure of basic developer knowledge, we use that as a reference point.

By going through this guide/course, you should have enough knowledge to -

  • implement configuration changes using clicks and enhance it further using code
  • implement business automation and validations using a slew of configuration/customisation options

Note that Salesforce recommends actual experience as an admin to attempt PD1 exam. You stand a good chance to complete the exam successfully even with lesser experience "iff" -

  • you have a strong technology background
  • go through a structured learning process
  • apply your knowledge in workshops
  • solve case studies
  • get mentored by Salesforce developers

Similar to our admin guide, this guide is targeted at developers who are interested in learning skills in the "core salesforce system" - this includes sales cloud, service cloud and what the platform itself. We do not quite go anywhere near Marketing Cloud, any of the AppExchange apps (e.g. Vlocity), Heroku and such.

# Duration

This course has been split into ~10 lessons. There are no strict guidelines on the number of days, but we have typically seen the lessons taught at an average rate of 0.5 to 1 lesson per day. This includes -

  • Teaching a class of ~10-15 students for 2 hours / day
  • Let students apply their knowledge during rest of the time

You can take a safe bet that learning Apex will take significant time and you should not be afraid to spend enough time there.

It is not uncommon to see people not being able to complete their assignments (what we call ALWs = Applied Learning Workshops), but they tend to catch up as we progress.

# Let's Get Started

All set? Check out the course structure by clicking on the link below!

Course Structure →