Summary

In this chapter, we reviewed some of the common Apex mistakes made by developers and how to resolve them. For many of you, the topics presented within this chapter will be familiar, although are hopefully a worthwhile refresher, with maybe some additional understanding or thoughts.

We begin this book with this chapter, as it is imperative we consider how to remove these common mistakes before we look at how to extend our knowledge around the rest of the platform's features. We also tried to cover in greater detail than is typical the reasoning behind some of these errors, either from the perspective of the underlying machine, as with the NullPointerException discussion we started with, or via the impact upon developer and deployment productivity, such as our final discussion on hardcoding.

To master any language means beginning by removing the minor common niggles that can cause issues and easily resolving bugs. Hopefully, through having a deeper or broader understanding of these issues and how they arise, you can more readily spot and rectify them in advance. That is not to say you will stop making them: I find these bugs and issues in my own code regularly, but I am able to recognize them in advance as I begin to develop, to stop them as routine and habit take hold.

Now that we have discussed these common problems and how to resolve them, we will move on to move detailed and prescriptive debugging in the next chapter.