Chapter 1: A Brief Introduction to Salesforce
We will start our journey through the Salesforce platform customization with a quick overview of the history of the company, by highlighting the key milestones across its 20+ years of life.
Then, we'll briefly see what's inside the platform and how it works, describing the multitenant architecture that lets multiple Salesforce customers be located on the same physical servers without harming one another this is the core of how Salesforce works and the reason of its successfully scalable and reliable architecture.
As this is a learning book, we'll also have a look at Trailhead, the fantastic learning platform that's rapidly becoming a founding brick of Salesforce knowledge-sharing philosophy. At the end of almost each chapter you'll see a Blaze your trail section that will contain Trailheads content related to the specific chapter's topic.
To test our new skills, we'll also see how to create a free environment (called a Salesforce Developer Edition org, or simply a DE org) activated with all the main platform features so that you can learn along with reading this book.
In this chapter, we'll focus on the following topics:
- Salesforce company history
- How the Salesforce platform is built
- How to have fun learning Salesforce with Trailhead
- How to create a Developer Edition org to learn with examples
