Simonds - Discussion on Almost Anything

Salesforce offers continuing education to anyone whom wishes to learn about their platform. During this past week I attended a class in Atlanta, Georgia at the Microtek Center. The class was Dev-531, Introduction to Object Oriented Programming using APEX.

The class is supposed to give people the fundamental understanding of how to develop using the Salesforce.com platform development code, APEX. The instructor was outstanding and tried to do his best to answer our questions, but the material lacked the right information to get across to students. Salesforce outsourced the materials and had the class written by a third parts. At least that is what we were told. They used a dog, yes a dog, to show the analogies of object oriented programming. That actually worked for the first day, but the same analogies were still being used by day 3. Honestly, while we all learned something, the dog analogy was getting a little old.

Salesforce really needs to revisit the curriculum and use more real world examples and tutorials using everyday objects within their platform. Instead of using the dog, they should have used the account or opportunity object. Also it seemed to me that the instructor was really tied to the materials and if any help was asked outside the material, the instructor seemed to struggle to "think outside the box". Also while classes seem to be the center point of instruction, I believe that Salesforce needs to restructure the Trigger part of the class and include more examples and cover all angels of APEX Triggers to include:

• Before Update
• After Update
• Before Insert
• After Insert
• Before Delete
• After Delete

They do not cover all of these different rules, usually sticking with before insert of before update. One item that I learned from this that is extremely important is that when a Trigger before update will automatically update the records without actually writing any DML statements within the Trigger. Here is an example of what I mean:

Code:

trigger New_Feed_Update on OpportunityLineItem (before update)
{

  for (OpportunityLineItem oli : Trigger.new)
  {  
    oli.will_test__c = oli.id;  
  }

}

In the class all of the Trigger examples had DML updates and while easy to understand, I had to get this information from the instructor by asking him because I did not understand how this can work without applying any DML statements. Now you all know!


Now overall I did enjoy the class and the instructor was willing to at least make an effort. On Friday we actually were able to get the instructor to deviate from the class for awhile and we created a trigger and class to update contacts from the account. It was actually really great that we were able to do this and I think that everyone in the class benefited from this. I know that I will be able to take the information and instruction that was given to us and apply it in the real world. I really hope to jump start my APEX career because we are doing more and more in the "Cloud".

Please do not allow this to discourage anyone who may read this poor Blog not to take the class. Salesforce just needs to tweak the curriculum just a little and then the class would be a home run. Other than the Dog analogy, this class is worth anyone taking.