When I was a child, I had a few secret wishes:

• Becoming a great football player: Given my limited football ability, I soon forgot this one.
• Becoming a rock star: Although I love playing drums and piano, I knew this was not my main path.
• Teaching a computer to do what I want: I started coding when I was a small child and this dream soon became reality; not by becoming the best coder in the world, but by being able to adapt to new technologies quickly and productively.
• Being able to draw like a real artist: No chance here – I've literally no artistic skills.
• Writing a book.

Writing a book is something that has always been on the list, but I've never had the skill to be a poet or a novel writer. A few years after the start of my career in the Salesforce world, and a few years before my first Salesforce MVP nomination, I casually started to write my own blog, Nerd @ Work, because I discovered that I had something to tell people: not philosophy, not an amazing drama, but my experience on the Salesforce platform. Who was the audience? The Salesforce Ohana, and I was surprised that people liked what I had to say (again, not art but solid technical stuff). This commitment to the community lead me to the unexpected Salesforce MVP nomination and, at the time of writing, I'm approaching my fifth nomination (fingers crossed).

But writing a blog is not like writing a whole book:

• With a blog, you don't have the same commitment: You can write whenever you want.
• With a blog, you don't need a logical thread: You can write whatever you want.
• With a blog, you just keep writing on and on: There is no end and there are no milestones.

That's why I started to think that I could end up with a whole book about the Salesforce platform, but honestly, I didn't have a clear idea of what to write about or whom the book should be targeted at.

And just while I was compiling a list of possible book titles, the Packt team appeared and proposed that I should write the very book that you are now reading – how strange life is!

Writing this book has been a great challenge that has involved countless weekends and nights passed reading, studying, deepening my knowledge, and writing and reviewing this content. 

Although the Packt team and I fixed few mid-term milestones, I only had one milestone in my mind: reach the last chapter, and I was surprised that, chapter after chapter, I really did end up finishing the book.

Childhood dream: check!

As a Salesforce developer and architect with more than 10 years' experience, I always say that any Salesforce technician should have strong administration skills, and I usually suggest that my young colleagues start their career with the Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification rather than the Platform Developer I certification. 

Since I was writing about a journey to the Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification, I knew that I had to not only pour all of my experience into the book, but also change my point of view: explaining advanced concepts to trailblazers who have potentially never had the chance to write a single line of code. Believe me, it's not the simplest thing to do, given that I'm a developer at heart who prefers to show code rather than explain how an algorithm works...why? Because it's easier for my brain.

While I was having to cover most of the Salesforce topics required for this certification, I tried to maintain a simple and trivial style to keep the storytelling funny and interesting, more or less like I try to do on my blog, without losing sight of the main target: helping you successfully gain the Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification.

There is no one size fits all rule, and I don't have the perfect recipe: study; experiment with configurations; and consolidate your knowledge with the reference links provided to official Salesforce docs, trailblazer's blogs, and Trailhead modules. But, most of all, trust yourself – don't be afraid to schedule your exam and face this certification. 

This book has been written to give the Salesforce Ohana another way to master the Salesforce platform and I really hope that, by the end of the last chapter, you'll feel more confident in your increased chances of successfully passing this hard, yet useful, certification and confirming that you are a, #AwesomeAdmin.