I am very pleased to be able to formally announce that I am working on a second edition of my book, Mastering Apex Programming! Firstly, I want to thank all of those people who have been kind enough to purchase and review the book, at the time of writing it has an average of 4.6/5 on Amazon which is incredible.
So why the second edition? What will be new, improved, added or removed?
Firstly the why. In the 2 years since the book was released Apex as a language has moved ahead and so I want to update some of the content to take note of tweaks or changes, as well as add some relevant sections on the new features that developers can utilise. My original aim for the book was - and will remain in this second edition - to help developers understand how and when to use a feature of the platform. How and why should I be using this feature, rather than simply a load of code for people to copy and paste.
So what specifically will be changing? Firstly, I am excited to announce that the book will increase in size from 16 chapters to 22. 6 brand new chapters packed full of content, with a portion of these coming together with some restructured material from the first edition to form an entire new section on integrations using Apex. So a 37.5% increase in the rough contents of the book with an entire new section. Of these new chapters, there are 3 in particular I want to call out.
Firstly, I will be adding a chapter on using Apex and Flow together. Flow has come on leaps and bounds since the initial writing of the book and it is imperative that as an Apex developer you know how to help extend your admins ability to work with the platform through the combination of Flow and Apex with Invocable Actions and Platform Events. Hopefully this chapter will help people see what I am beginning to see in a lot of areas as a service or domain driven approach to organising their Salesforce implementation.
Secondly, Salesforce Functions. I couldn’t help but notice that its been a while since I last posted on this blog, and 2 of the last 3 posts were related to Salesforce Functions and functions as a service. Salesforce Functions is a huge new feature within the platform and something I wanted to ensure were covered to help developers understand how and when to use them.
Finally, the third new chapter I want to call out is on the use of DataWeave in Apex. DataWeave is a data processing language from the MuleSoft platform that Apex developers can now use to process and manipulate data in a simple and scalable manner. It’s a really exciting feature for the platform and for Apex developers and one I cannot wait to share more information and detail on.
There are other changes, updates and amendments too of course, but hopefully this has been enough to pique your interest. The writing process is started and underway and the release is scheduled for the end of the year. If you want to keep updated of any news on the book as we go, you can follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Medium.