Choosing Your Development Environment

To follow along with the exercises in this book, you'll need a Salesforce account. If you're already a Salesforce customer, you can use a Force.com sandbox. A sandbox is a copy of your organization that you can use for testing configurations and training users without compromising the data in your production organization. Salesforce Enterprise, Unlimited, and Performance Editions come with one free sandbox; users of other editions can use Developer Edition to do the exercises.

If you're new to Salesforce or if you don't want to use a sandbox, go to developer.force.com and sign up for a free Developer Edition account. Developer Edition is a fully-functional version of Salesforce that you can use to develop Salesforce apps. Since it's free, there are limits on the amount of users, bandwidth, and storage you're allowed, but it includes all of the features in Salesforce. When you sign up, you'll also automatically become part of the growing community of Force.com platform developers around the world.