About a week ago, I signed up for the “Apex” online course available via my company’s premier support for our grandfathered Unlimited Edition of Salesforce. I did the first 3 sections of the course that day, which were largely introductions to the course interface and the Force.com platform.
Tonight, I completed two more sections of the course. The two sections were, “Introduction to Apex (35 mins),” and “Data Types and Logic (20 mins).” Two things got my attention in that content:
1. Although Apex is very similar to Java in its syntax, one difference is that Apex DOES NOT support “case” and “switch” statements. This is good to know, as a colleague and I were tossing around the option of changing some code in one of our Salesforce apps to use case…guess we won’t be doing that!
2. I never really paid attention to the different editions of Salesforce, and to whether or not each has the ability to develop Apex code. It looks like, of the currently existing Editions, Enterprise and Performance Editions will let you create Apex code in SANDBOXES ONLY. Developer Edition will let you create code in Production, apparently, which I didn’t really think about in the past. But, yeah, I’m logged in to a dev account writing code for these training exercises, and it’s clearly working. The Contact Manager, Group, and Professional Editions DO NOT let you create custom apps / develop with Apex code.
So, that’s 5 sections down in the Apex course, and 8 to go. It looks like I’ve got 225 minutes of that course left (although the sections take longer than the billed time due to pausing, reviewing, and completing exercises). I figure 5 to 6 more hours and I’ll have made it through this course. Yes, a lot of this is review after having been working with Apex and Visualforce for a year and a half, but I’ve already picked up a few things I’ve missed along the way.