Alberto Paro is the author of Elasticsearch 8.x Cookbook, Edition 5. He has written 4 best-selling books previously on ElasticSearch.
We got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt again.
Q: What are your specialist tech area(s)?
Alberto: Big Data processing, NoSQL, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Alberto: I started writing the first book about ElasticSearch in 2010 because at that time knowledge of this technology was very scarce.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Alberto: I worked on a lot of ElasticSearch source code to customize for my needs in the early days, so I maturated a deep knowledge of the technology. In ElasticSearch’s early days the documentation was poor so I had to read and understand the source code to be able to use ElasticSearch at maximum potential.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
A: Generally I have little spare time. The first book was written on the bed while I was putting my son to sleep. It took 8 months to write it. The other books published by me were simple because I became an expert in the editing flows.
Q. What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
A: Elasticsearch is one of the most beautiful solutions to search data, and, because searching became the core of many applications, searching technology with ElasticSearch in the future will be bright.
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
A: My effort was spent writing a book to try to simplify complex patterns in using ElasticSearch. A lot of people read my previous book versions and they sent many positive feedbacks about the topics that I discussed in the book. The number of releases, the continuous improvements of the content, and the number of topics is the key points that differentiate mine from other books.
Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?
A: The book is full of knowledge, the key takeaway depends on the readers: Managers can understand how to use ElasticSearch in their projects, Architects will know how to build valid ElasticSearch architectures, different kinds of developers can learn how best to use ElasticSearch.
Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
A: The only top tip for learning tech is using it! Practise is the key to improvement in every field.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
A: Readers can follow my Medium page at https://medium.com/@aparo77
Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?
A: I belong to many community groups (ElasticSearch, OpenSearch, Scala, ZIO, Rust…), but I have little spare time to participate.
Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
A: I wanted to write a book as a personal experience, so when I was contacted by Packt, I accepted and I met “virtually” different people in the Packt family. Writing a book is not easy, because it requires time, continuous rewrites, and fixes. People at Packt helped a lot during this journey.
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
A: I daily follow Google tech recommendations and https://medium.com.
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
A: I organize the writing of the book into small sections that can be executed in about 1 hour’s time. Then I organize my activities to have time to execute every single section with no stops. The book was mainly written on weekends (morning/afternoon) or in the evening when the children sleep, to not be interrupted.
Q. What is the one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
A: Writing a book requires a lot of time. To be able to successfully optimize my time, I split the book sections into small parts and for every small section I estimate 1 hour of time to write, review and test to be executed no-stop to reduce “context switch”. With this approach, I was able to maximize my time and reduced the time wasted rewriting parts.
You can find Alberto’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here.
