Xiaodi Yan is the author of Web API Development with ASP.NET Core 8; we got the chance to sit down and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What is the name of your book?
Xiaodi: Web API Development with ASP.NET Core 8
Q: What are your specialist tech areas?
Xiaodi: .NET, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, DevOps, Cloud-Native
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Xiaodi: One Packt editor contacted me on LinkedIn and asked me whether I wanted to author a book. I often write blogs so maybe it’s time to author a book.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Xiaodi: Not much time as I’m quite familiar with ASP.NET Core.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Xiaodi: The main challenge was that my spare time was limited as I have quite a few personal commitments besides my full-time job. I did devote lots of my time to this book.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Xiaodi: ASP.NET Core is a great platform for building modern cloud-native web APIs. .NET 8 provides improvements to make it better.
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Xiaodi: I think the main differences are: that I tried to cover DevOps concepts in this book, including testing, CI/CD, etc. Also, I introduced different API styles beyond REST, such as GraphQL, gRPC, SignalR, etc. In addition, I introduced some open-source frameworks as a starting point.
Q: What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away with from the book?
Xiaodi: How to build a web API using ASP.NET Core and how to test, and deploy to the cloud.
Q. What advice would you give to readers jumping into this technology? Do you have any top tips?
Xiaodi: The top tip is it’s important to write code by yourself and read official documents.
Q: Can you share any blogs, websites, and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning? What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away with from the book?
Xiaodi: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn
Q. How would you describe your author’s journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Xiaodi: Overall it’s good. Maybe the editors need to pay more attention on the code formats. Some codes were changed for some reason (e.g. quotes, spellings, etc.) so I had to fix them.
Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?
Xiaodi: I run a local .NET User Group. I’m also a member of the dotnet foundation.
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Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
Xiaodi: Learn, practice, and share. Read others’ blogs and articles, make pet projects, and share what I learned with the community.
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Xiaodi: It’s hard, really hard.
Q. What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Xiaodi: Make things simple, clear, and organized. It’s hard to find a balance.
Q. Would you like to share your social handles? If so, please share.
Xiaodi: Linkedin
You can find Xiaodi’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here
