Great FREE online class about Lightning

SalesforceU, the people who bring you all the premier online and class-driven courses about Salesforce technologies, have just released a new online course that walks you through what you need to get started developing with Lightning. This is a beginner course, but since Lightning is so brand new this is a GREAT way to get up to speed quickly. 

And in case you do not know, Lightning was announced at last years Dreamforce 14. It is a component-based development technology that allows Salesforce developers to build responsive Salesforce1 mobile applications quickly and easily – for any kind of device.

The only downside about the course is that it is only available through a paid Salesforce edition, so you will not be able to access it through a trial org or Development org. But, if your company has a paid subscription, then you can login and access it through the Help & Training Standard Catalog, or though this link.

Another important thing to note is that if you go to the link I just gave you, you get a listing of 6 modules that this course consists of. If you click any of the links, it spawns a new browser tab and starts that module. Unfortunately, the player does not let you go directly to the next module, so when you get to the end of a module, do not think that is the end of the course. It is just the end of that module. You will have to close that tab and go back to original tab that displayed all the modules to click the link of the next module.

The course is taught by Salesforce MVP, Instructor and Advanced Developer Don Robins, and he does a great job of stepping you through all the material in a way that does not put you to sleep. He starts slow and makes sure you understand exactly what Lightning is and what the implications of it are. He then takes you through all the specific parts that make up a Lightning application and explains in practical detail what you need to know. By the end of the course (which is a little over one hour), you will understand how to asynchronously bind to your Salesforce data in the back end, how to nest components to build complex mobile pages, and how to handle events so you can build interactive mobile pages that respond quickly to user input. He walks you through creating a mobile app that displays expenses and lets users approve them right from the Salesforce1 app.

If you are the type of person that learns best through videos and not reading through boring documentation, then this is for you. It is a great first step for learning about Lightning. I found it a lot more helpful than working through the Lightning tutorials at Dreamforce. Those were helpful at getting my hands dirty, but they didn’t really teach me much about the underlying technology, as this online course does. This course does a great job of explaining in detail how things work and puts all the pieces together.

So check it out and let me know what you thought about it…