Last week Josh Kaplan (Senior Product Manager for Apex) and I presented a ‘Intro to Apex’ webinar. As I have noted earlier, we saw overwhelming demand for this webinar and had to add an extra live run after the first two sold out early. As much as I would like to attribute this level of interest to the webinar speakers, its really a testament to how rapidly the Force.com development community is growing (e.g. we’ve gone from 1 billion to 2.4+ billion lines of Apex code is just over an year). Apex is one of the core building blocks of the Force.com platform and in this webinar Josh and I introduced the programming language to a mixed audience of developers and non-developers (e.g. Salesforce Admins making their first foray into writing code) alike.
The recording from last week’s webinar is now available. In addition to the webinar recording, you can also download the slide deck and peruse all the code that Josh and I reviewed in this GitHub repo. If you’re new to GitHub and want a quick way to download the code, just click on the ‘ZIP’ cloud icon on that page.
So what next? Once you’ve watched the webinar recording and hopefully perused some of the sample code, what’s the next step in your Apex journey? I would recommend the following steps and resources for an Apex newbie to follow-up on after the webinar:
- If you haven’t done so already, sign up for a free Developer Edition Org. This is an environment for you to experiment and learn Apex (and other Platform technologies) without affecting your live Production Salesforce instance and so sign up for one ASAP.
- Complete the Apex Workbook. It has a series of short 30-minute tutorials that take you through a hands-on tour of the Apex programming language.
- Go to the Apex landing page on developer.force.com (aka DFC) for many other learning resources for Apex.
- Speaking of developer.force.com, that is a one-stop shop for anyone interested in developing on the Force.com platform. Documentation, code samples, technical blogs, webinar listings and much, much more can be found on that website and it’s a must-have bookmark for anyone interested in the Force.com platform. In particular, the Discussion Boards are extremely active and have a wealth of information for you to leverage.
- If you learn better in a formal training setting, we have several instructor led training courses that you can sign-up for. Specifically, if you’re a developer, you can sign up for the ‘Apex and Visualforce Controllers’ training course. If however you don’t have a development background, we have a ‘Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming with Force.com Code‘ course targeted specifically for non-developers.
- If you’re joining us for Dreamforce this year, we have several sessions dedicated to Apex. The ‘Hands-on Training: Introduction to Apex for Non-Developers’ session in particular is a great one to attend if Apex is your first foray in learning a programming language. I’ll be blogging in another week or two about some of the other great Apex sessions we have this year, so stay tuned for that.
- Quick, what are the two favorite keyboard shortcuts for any developer (on a PC anyway)? Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v. There is nothing better than being able to use existing code snippets and the Cookbook section of developer.force.com is a great place to find samples for common Apex use cases.