#Success story!

Hi everyone! Sorry I've been away from the community for so long; however, I have some exciting news!

On Friday, May 5th, I completed the Apex Specialist Superbadge, with a First Ascent Flag on top! I had been learning Apex for a while now, but that was the last thing that I felt I needed to accomplish before attempting the Platform Developer 1 Certification on Monday, May 8th. I now present to you a newly minted Salesforce Certified Platform Developer!

According to the section-level scores, I did fairly well; much better than the required 68%. I am honored, and very blessed, to be surrounded by a community of Salesforce users, MVPs, and Salesforce staff and am very thankful for their help in preparing me for this exam. It's been a long journey, but it has only just begun, and I hope that I'll continue to be blessed with your help, advice, and encouragement for the remainder of that journey.

As a token of my appreciation, here is some advice that I hope will help anyone looking to become a Certified Platform Developer 1 in this community.

Firstly, I don't recommend that this be your first certification. I highly recommend that you earn the Admin and Platform App Builder Certification before considering the Developer Certifications. I recommend that because it is a very crucial part of the exam to know the declaritive functionalities of Salesforce, specifically Salesforce's Process Automation Suite (Lightning Process Builder, Workflow, Approvals, and Visual Workflow). It is essential to know the differences between Process Builder and Workflow, as well as each of the tools' capabilities and when to use them instead of a trigger or other code. While not required by Salesforce, you practically must have the Platform App Builder certification, or at least the equivalent knowledge. If you aren't a developer already, before learning a language, learn the #ButtonClick Admin side of Salesforce before approaching code with a ten-foot pole; it's a lot easier and perhaps more beneficial in the short-term. If you are already a developer, especially a Java developer, Apex should come fairly easy to you, so I recommend that you too learn the Administrative aspects of Salesforce.

"Every good developer must be a good admin as well!" - David Liu, SFDC99.com.

My second recommendation to you is to go though the Apex Beginner tutorials on SFDC99.com. Trailhead, as much as I really enjoy and strongly recommend you go through as well, unfortunately just doesn't break down the basics of programming to us admins and beginners enough to use it to learn Apex as a first language. However, SFDC99 does this very well and makes it very easier to grasp some of Apex's fundamentals. If you feel that you need to learn more by doing rather than by reading, I recommend that you go through codecademy.com 's courses on either Java or JavaScript. Java is very similar to Apex, so I hear, whereas JavaScript is very different than Apex, but more popular and perhaps more useful, maybe. There will be a bigger learning curve, I assume as I haven't done the courses on Java, if you learn JavaScript like I did, simply because JavaScript is fundamentally different than Java and Apex. At any rate, I recommend that you learn at least one of those two languages and then dive in face-first into SFDC99. Afterwards, the foundation will have been laid, and the Trailhead modules will make more sense and you will learn more from them than if you knew nothing at all about programming.

Lastly, don't neglect Visualforce! Have you learned the administrative side of Salesforce? Check. Have you learned Apex? Check. What about Visualforce? "Well, no. There's not much Visualforce on the test, right? I should be okay." WRONG! There is a good number of questions about Visualforce on the test and you need to know the basics of it, and, at a minimum, understand in detail how standard controllers, controller extensions, standard set controllers, and custom controllers work. I did not know how these things worked, but thankfully I decided to pop open the Visualforce guide and read about it. If I wouldn't have done this, I might not be writing this post because I could've failed! Take an hour or two out of your day and read Standard Controllers, Standard List Controllers, and Custom Controllers and Controller Extensions starting here: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.pages.meta/pages/pages_controller_std.htm Read everything! I also want to mention that you probably should know a little bit more about Visualforce than just controllers; you'll have a better chance of passing.

@David K. Liu, I have successfully completed your challenge to become a Salesforce developer this year and passed the test! I don't plan to stop here though; my next steps are to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in more depth so that I can learn all of Salesforce's programmatic technologies and become a much better and more valuable developer! Next stop: Platform Developer 2! Thank you so much, David, for your story, your inspiration, your encouragement, your advice, and your leadership in the community! I truly do believe that a great part of why I was able to learn Apex so soon was because of you, your blog, and all of your hard work!

To God be all the glory!

Thank you to everyone reading this,

Parker Edelmann