[SalesForce] New Certified Platform Developer II Exam

This answer may well get downvoted since there's already an answer that basically copy + pasted the study guide, but I can offer some tips and insight into what I found surprising and what was expected.

I passed Platform Developer I over the weekend. I was studying for Advanced Developer when they announced the changes - as a result, for this exam, I felt overprepared in some areas and underprepared in others.

In general, the study guide is a "fair" representation of the actual exam material, in the sense that most of what was on the exam was contained in the study guide in some form or another - but this is not to say that you have to know every item in the study guide down cold to pass this exam.

I will break it down into two major areas:

1. Working experience with Apex/Visualforce/SOQL/SOSL (roughly 35%)

2. Platform Fundamentals (roughly 65%)

#1:

I would say that personally, I was likely prepared for these questions after 6 months of developing on the Force.com platform. Without intense preparation, I don't think Platform Developer I can realistically be achieved without at least this much time developing hands-on with Apex and Visualforce. There will be questions that mimic common design patterns and "gotchas" in the context of triggers, classes, controllers, extensions, governor limits. You need to really understand WHY governor limits and design patterns exist instead of simply memorizing the documentation (although that helps). You need to know Apex fundamentals down cold - such as:

• Controllers vs extensions
• With/without sharing and how that's enforced up an execution context
• Best testing practices (design and annotations)
• The order of execution in a transaction (this is huge - you must know this cold)
• Schema and Database classes are powerful tools and you need to know their methods cold as well

#2:

This is where you demonstrate your ability to recall fundamentals of the platform. A lot of functionality that makes Salesforce truly powerful is tested here:

• Knowing when to use workflows/Process Builder/triggers/formula fields.
• You must have a crystal-clear understanding of how security is enforced across different types of object relationships.
• Know the different types of orgs, which type is appropriate for certain situations, and
• Different ways to move metadata from one org to another.
• Schema Builder

It truly is a fun exam if you're prepared for it, and it is much more representative of developing on the platform than the original developer certification was. If this answer is received well, I can update with more information.

I followed the transition track from advanced developer to the platform developer II exam. So I did not take the platform developer 1 exam, but got the certification all the same.

Take into consideration that these exams are reviewed and extended every release and it is thus likely that the questions on developing lightning will increase and so will their detail or complexity from what it may be now.

Having done nearly all other certifications I would interpret it like this:

• Know how to compare Lightning to Visualforce
• Know where you can use Lightning components and applications
• Read the high level help/documentation introduction to see what benefits are mentioned to both end users and developers.
• Understand how you develop (and deploy?) a lightning component
• Developer a hello-world component and try to get some data from a controller
• Do any trailhead modules on lightning components (may include the point above)