I Passed the Salesforce.com Certified Advanced Developer Exam – So Can You!
July 13th, 2009
I passed the Salesforce.com Certified Advanced Developer exam last Friday but it was not easy test. The questions were very tricky and some of the answers I knew only because of experience. You can read all of the suggested course material and take the DEV-501 class, but I think people that don’t develop in Apex every day are going to be at a disadvantage. You really need to dig into the language and get your hands dirty in the real world.
From what I’ve heard there appears to be a number of different test versions but hit roughly the same material. My exam consisted of some high level questions (eg “What are the advantages of….”), comparisons of method and class signatures and specific code examples.
If you are new to Apex then the DEV-501 class is a must. If you have been doing Apex for sometime and are really mucking around with the language and comfortable with it, then I’m not sure how much of a benefit the class will be to you. All of the documentation you need is available from developer.force.com. I studied for about 3 days straight before the exam and here is what I did:
- Force.com Apex Code Developer’s Guide – You must know this document from start to finish.
- Visualforce Developer’s Guide – You must know this document from start to finish.
- Force.com Developer Guide – You should read through this book also, as it has alot of nuggets. Pay attention to the tips scattered through out the book.
- Salesforce Object Query Language – You must know SOQL
Here are some high points of the exam:
- Visualforce – know all of the components, how they are used and their attributes
- Controllers – know the differences between custom controllers and extensions and how they function
- Unit testing – how to write unit tests with proper test coverage
- Email services – there were surprisingly numerous questions regarding inbound and outbound email
- SOQL – you must know how to construct SOQL queries with and without related objects
- Trigers – you must know what you can and can not do with triggers. The order of execution is also important.
- Classes, method and annotations – really dig into the classes section of the Apex Developer’s Guide
All of this stuff is covered in the books and nothing is inside information. If you study and know the material you should be able to pass your first time. I believe that passing the Salesforce.com Certified Force.com Developer exam is still required before taking the Advanced Developer exam.
Categories: Apex, Salesforce, Visualforce
Planning to give the exam soon, finished 501 class few months back.Had a question about the Programming assignment.How big is it? How may days we get? How hard is it? Does it cover exercies from Dev 501 class.
Any help will be appreciated….Thanks
+1 on more info re: coding assignment. Thanks for the tips and info
I know this is a little late message,
but Congrats !!!
So you are also done with the programming
assignments & essays ? It would be really
helpful if you could throw some light
on that.
I failed the programming assignment but you can probably learn from my mistakes. It’s very important to clarify what they mean by “Large Data Sets”
Steve,
Thanks for all the tips here. I took the Multiple choice 2 days back and I passed it. I was told that
the window for assignment section would open up sometime later.
Meanwhile, do you have anyother tips on what would the programming assignment look alike ? how many days
would we be provided to work on the assignment ? Any hints around that would be helpful.
Once again, I would like thank you for the tips so far,.
Thanks.
Jeff,
Thanks for all the tips here. I took the Multiple choice 2 days back and I passed it. I was told that
the window for assignment section would open up sometime later.
Meanwhile, do you have anyother tips on what would the programming assignment look alike ? how many days
would we be provided to work on the assignment ? Any hints around that would be helpful.
Once again, I would like thank you for the tips so far,.
Thanks.
hi i’m planning to take salesforce.com developer exam DEV401..Please guide me in this.
please let me know more about the assignment and essays assessment to clear dev – 501 exam. i have cleared the multiple choice answers test…
The email notification for the assignment and essay went out a couple of weeks ago so no one has taken it yet. I believe the deadline is early February.
Congrats dude….!!!
I would also like to know :
Have you also cleared DEV401 certification ?
What preparation you did for that?
Tell something about this exam also…
Really helpful !!!
Can you please put some light on assignment part of this certification….
If there were any questions asking government limits for different org.
I would run through the Administrator training on iTunes and also the admin documentation especially the Force.com Fundamentals book at developer.force.com.
Rajan/Sudhan,
For admin and developer salesforce certification, this resource has tutorials, mock exams and FAQs.
What is the exact proces for 501 certification? Does it include project to be submitted?
Your help is much appreciated
Thanks in advance
@Anita, there are 2 parts to the 501 certification. First you must pass the multiple choice test. Roughly twice a year Salesforce sends out an email for people who passed the test to build a app per their specifications, submit it and then take a small test to justify their work.
Hi Jeff,
The pattern of Question paper for 501 was multiple choice ?
Does it include project to be submitted?
Thanks,
Kirtesh
Hi Jeff,
I have passed the SFDC developer examination. I am planning to give the advanced developer examination. I was going through the study materials. I wanted to know if you need to learn the syntax for different components. Do you get questions on “what are is the syntax for this compnent” etc
Please advise.
Thanks,
Ganesh
@Ganesh, no…they didn’t have any question that granular if I remember correctly. Fairly high level stuff.
Hi Jeff,
Nice to see that you cleared advanced developer certification.Thats really Great!AS iam planning to take advanced developer certification,I would like to know how tough is the assignment part of advanceddeveloper certification.Please guide us in completing it successfully.What documentation we have to refer to complete it successfully.Any help will be of great useful to me.Your blog has been very useful to me and others,I learned a lot from ur blog.Thanks for ur support and your interest in sharing ur knowledge with others.
Thanks again,
Please visit this link for some of the Mock SFDC Certification Exam allaboutsfdc.yolasite.com
Hi Jeff,
As an advanced developer, do you take the same maintenance exams as a regular certified developer?
thanks,
Jason Gabler
@Jason, so I have 4 certs (2 admin and 2 dev) but I only take an exam for admin and an exam for developer. HTH
Jeff – your pointers were very valuable to me. I had taken the 501class, certed 401 a few months ago, and had been working on the platform for over a year. BUT if I had NOT followed your advice, particularly with deep review of the PDF ebook Dev Guides, (and made sure I was at least conceptually familiar with the AJAX toolkit,) I would have missed many more questions. Following your suggestions I did pass last week and with great confidence that I knew almost every answer. Thanks!
Awesome @Don!!! Glad to hear I could help!
[...] und selektiver als dieser Test kann die Programmierübung nicht werden. Ich schließe mich der Meinung anderer Zertifizierter an, dass der Test recht schwer ist und nur mit der Kombination auf mehrmonatiger Praxiserfahrung, [...]
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