Salesforce Developer study guide
Salesforce Developer · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
Salesforce Certified Platform Developer is a Salesforce credential for developers who build on the Lightning Platform. Per Salesforce's own description, certified Platform Developers "understand how to develop and deploy custom business logic and custom interfaces using the programmatic capabilities of the Lightning Platform," and they can "extend the Lightning Platform using Apex and Visualforce." That makes it a code-centered credential rather than a declarative one: it sits alongside the Platform App Builder certification, which Salesforce describes as covering declarative customization, and below Platform Developer II, which Salesforce describes as being for developers who are experts in advanced programmatic capabilities and who use data modeling to build complex business logic and interfaces. The Salesforce Developer study guide has 6 sections and about 2,155 words.
01Salesforce Fundamentals
Salesforce is a multitenant, metadata-driven platform: customers share application servers and database infrastructure, and your customizations live as metadata rather than in a forked copy of the product. Two consequences drive most exam questions.
343 words, about 2 min02Data Modeling and Management
Data modeling questions reward one simple test: what must the relationship do? A lookup is a loose association - both objects keep their own owner and sharing, and deleting the parent leaves children in place.
410 words, about 2 min03Process Automation and Logic
Most logic questions are really order-of-execution questions. On save, the platform approximately: loads or initializes the record, runs before-save record-triggered flows , runs before triggers , applies system validation, applies custom validation rules , applies duplicate rules, saves to the database, runs after triggers , then assignment rules, auto-response rules and workflow rules, then after-save flows , then roll-up summaries, then commits.
360 words, about 2 min04User Interface
You must place a requirement into the correct stack. Lightning Web Components are standard JavaScript with a bundle ( component.js , component.html , component.js-meta.xml ) and are the default for new development.
360 words, about 2 min05Testing
Apex tests live in @isTest classes containing test methods. Each test runs in its own transaction with a fresh set of governor limits and, by default, cannot see any existing org data .
347 words, about 2 min06Debug and Deployment Tools
Debug logs are available from the Developer Console, VS Code and the Setup log viewer. Logs have per-category levels (Apex, Database, Workflow, Validation, Callout, System) and a size cap - setting everything to FINEST usually truncates the part you need.
335 words, about 2 min