Start Learning Lightning Components with Trailhead

If you don’t like reading pages and pages of technical documentation, instead (like me) prefer to learn the basic concepts quickly and then get your hands dirty by building something, then you should checkout Trailhead, an interactive learning platform to grasp basic and advanced concepts of the Salesforce platform.

One of the appealing features of Trailhead is that it caters to both newbies who are just starting their salesforce journey, and experienced pros who have been building applications on the platform for some time. Trailhead is comprised of modules which in turn contain tutorials with an exercise at the end for the user to complete and earn points. When you complete all tutorials in a module you get a badge that you can show off on your community profile. Each module is focussed on one topic or feature and they can be completed in any order.

Experienced developers and admins will breeze through the first few modules on platform basics, data model, security etc. The advanced sections around business processes, Visualforce, Apex, Process Builder and Lightning will definitely teach you something new. And did I mention that you can earn points and badges along the way.

My current favourite module is unsurprisingly about Lightning Component. Lightning Components and the App builder will revolutionize how we build enterprise apps and custom functionality on the platform. If you want to learn about components, you can either download the developer guides, or you could try out the trailhead module for Lightning components.

The module covers the following units:

• Getting started with Components
• Creating Components
• Defining Component Attributes
• Using Expressions
• Using Standard and Force.com components
• Handling events with Client side controllers
• Using javascript controllers with components
• Using apex in Components
• Debugging your components

At the end of each unit you can complete an exercise and earn points. Don’t skip the exercise since it helps you reinforce the understanding of key concepts and facts covered in the unit.

The key takeaway is that if you are familiar with Visualforce and Apex, and want to start building components asap, then this module will get you started.