Earlier this year, we announced that Amazon was teaming up with developer education company Big Nerd Ranch to deliver immersive, free training for the Alexa Skills Kit. The training shows you how to build Alexa skills from start to finish, from setting up your dev environment to certification and more complex skill interactions like account linking. Here's a recap of the six-part blog training series.

Setting Up Your Local Environment (part 1 of 6): This post will guide you through setting up a local development environment so that you can work more efficiently, enabling you to rapidly test your Alexa skills as you develop them. We will first set up a working environment with Node.js, and then we will build a model for our Alexa skill, Airport Info. We will use Chai and Mocha, two JavaScript assertion and test libraries to build our tests.

Implementing an Intent with Alexa-app and Alexa-app-server (part 2 of 6): In this second post, we’ll be using alexa-app as a framework to build our Alexa skill and alexa-app-server will allow us to test interacting with the skill locally. We will be using these libraries because they grant a path to supporting a local development and testing workflow with an Alexa skill, which allows us to rapidly test and develop.

Deploying Your Skill to Staging (part 3 of 6): In part three, we'll move from the local development environment to staging. We’ll go over how you can test your skill in the service simulator and on an Alexa-enabled device by creating a new skill on the Amazon Alexa Developer Console and then deploying your code to AWS Lambda.  

Implementing Persistence in an Alexa Skill (part 4 of 6): In this next post, we’ll implement persistence in a new skill, CakeBaker, so that users will be able to access information saved from their previous interactions. This is useful in cases where the skill would time out or when the interaction cycle is complete. We'll go over how to write Alexa skill data to storage with DynamoDB, a NoSQL-style database.  

Submitting an Alexa Skill for Certification (part 5 of 6): In part five, we’ll guide you through the Alexa skills submission process and help you get your skill published. You’ll learn about Amazon’s guidelines to get your skill ready for certification so that your Alexa skill has a quick and successful review.  

Account Linking Using OAuth (part 6 of 6): In this final blog in the series, we will discuss how to link an Alexa skill to accounts for other services and make it even more useful. As an example, we will use account linking and the OAuth protocol to grant delegated authority to our Airport Info skill so that it can post an airport’s flight status to a user’s Twitter account.

Did you learn something in this series that you implemented in your own Alexa skill? Let us know what you’ve built on Twitter by mentioning @AlexaDevs and @bignerdranch.

Learn More

Check out these Alexa developer resources:

• Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)
• Alexa Developer Forums
• Knowledge Base
• Alexa Skills Kit Training
• Developer Office Hours