What this book covers

Chapter 1, Salesforce Fundamentals, teaches you about Salesforce Platform in general, and how Salesforce can be used by companies to support their day-to-day business processes for sales, services, marketing, field services, finance, IT, HR, and in other departments.

Chapter 2, Understanding Data Modeling and Management, teaches you how to start customizing Salesforce Platform to fit your business needs; how to use the standard objects, create custom objects, and add fields to capture data specific to your business and create relationships between those objects to create a 360° view.

Chapter 3, Declarative Automation, shows you the different tools that are available within the platform, such as workflow rules, Process Builder, and Flow, to automate processes such as updating the values of fields, creating automated tasks, sending out emails internally and externally, and even creating and updating records based upon specific user actions.

Chapter 4, Apex Basics, explains the Apex programming language. What is it? When is it used? You will learn the basic syntax so you can read and understand how logic is executed on the platform. On top of that, you'll learn how to write it yourself and create your own custom logic from scratch.

Chapter 5, Apex - Beyond the Basics, goes over some more advanced concepts of Apex, such as web service callouts and trigger frameworks.

Chapter 6, The Salesforce User Interface, teaches you how you can create your own visual interfaces on the platform by using Visualforce pages, Visualforce components, and Lightning components. Salesforce gives you lots of declarative features to modify the look and feel of your user interface, but you never know when you'll come across a requirement for which those are just not enough.

Chapter 7, Testing in Salesforce, is a very important chapter because you may have created the most beautiful Visualforce pages with excellent custom logic in your sandbox, but you won't be able to deploy them to your production environment unless you have tested whether all your customizations behave as you would expect. This chapter teaches you the principles of testing your code, making sure you get the expected results, and making your custom logic ready for deployment to another environment.

Chapter 8, Debugging and Deployment Tools, focuses on the different development tools available to you as a developer. While creating your custom logic, you will most probably encounter errors. This chapter teaches you how to debug those errors and how to solve them so your code runs smoothly. In this final chapter, we also cover different methods for deploying your custom application to another unrelated environment.

Chapter 9, Mock Tests, gives you the chance to test yourself. This exam is a representation of what the real Salesforce Platform I certification exam is like. It does not contain the actual questions, but very similar ones. This is meant to give you a feel of what type of questions will be asked, and how many per topic. Score above 80% on this mock exam and you will most likely pass the real exam.