Preface

Since the beginning of my career in the Salesforce ecosystem as a Salesforce junior developer in 2009, it was clear to me that learning Salesforce was not a hard path if you had the right guidance. It's also been a long time from the point that I actually understood that what I know can be profitable for other professionals, since I realized that I badly wanted to write a book for beginners to help them learn the platform by way of examples, transferring to people what I have learned in more than 10 years of projects, trial and error, and consultancy.

According to Burning Glass Report, on the whitepaper titled Skilling Up for the Future: The Growing Demand for Salesforce Talent (available at https://developer.salesforce.com/resources2/career2017/docs/Skilling+Up+for+the+Future.pdf), 4.2 million jobs will be created in the Salesforce ecosystem worldwide, making Salesforce one of the most in-demand technologies (third place in 2018). The increased need for Salesforce professionals elevates the urgency for well-defined career paths with clear trails and goals, delivering to this ecosystem technical specialists (such as developers and architects) that should have strong IT backgrounds, but also less technical skilled people such as business analysts or administrators, roles that ideally anyone with any background can reach.

This urgency brought Salesforce to deliver one of the coolest e-learning portals ever, http://www.trailhead.com, which, along with a wonderful community of professionals, users, technology starters, an incredibly rich help portal, and thousands of blogs, videos, and books, makes learning Salesforce and related products a reachable task, even if you haven't ever worked on the platform.

The goal of this book is focused on the Salesforce CRM platform, the oldest and most available product of the Salesforce ecosystem, and specifically on its implementation with a low-code approach. One of the key principles of Salesforce customization is that you don't need to know any programming language to administer a Salesforce organization and understand the concepts in this book, which will be a guide for your Salesforce administrator, developer, or consultant starting paths.

I tried to infuse my own experience into the narration and, although it may seem excessive for a beginner audience, even advanced concepts on Salesforce configuration, because I believe that a book should be a guide and so it may be read more than once, where each read becomes clearer thanks to the knowledge the reader will take in day by day.

As I always say during public speeches, Salesforce is the love of my life (I mean of my professional life, otherwise my wife would be really disappointed) and this book is a way to say thank you to a technology that made me a (professional) man.