Preface

Salesforce.com's platform is one of the most exciting and unique development platforms for business applications. A lot of Salesforce development can be done declaratively without writing code, but to truly master the platform, you'll need to be able to develop not only declaratively, but also with code. Ultimately, you will need to know when to use which toolset—declarative or code.

It is relatively easy, in a world with Salesforce developer forums, Stack Overflow, and user groups, to find others who have faced the same issues you're facing. As a developer, it's likely that you can cobble together a solution from posted solutions. Understanding and tweaking those posts into a solution for your particular problem, however, requires a greater mastery of the platform.

This book is all about mastering the platform; taking your skills as a developer and tuning them for the unique features of the Salesforce platform. We'll discuss the architecture and code and which tool to use for the job. It's going to be awesome. So let's get started…