Estelle Scifo is the author of the book Hands-On Graph Analytics with Neo4j, we got the chance to sit down with her and find out more about her experience of writing with Packt.
Q: How long did it take you to write the book?
Estelle: Approximately 7 months.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Estelle: The research phase prior to the book was quite short (had to draw an Outline in a few days only) but I mainly checked which books already existed on the topics (Graph Analytics on one hand and Neo4j on the other hand). The goal was to come-up with a different approach, and that’s what led me for instance to integrate algorithms implementation examples into the book, which was missing from the other related titles.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Estelle: Writing a book is a challenge by itself! The most challenging part was the feeling of being alone during a long part of the writing process, but the willing to issue something great and useful to many was bigger than anything else.
Q: What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Estelle: Practice! Reading should be seen as the very first step in the learning process. Packt books have lot of code examples, copy them, run them, try and modify them, understand what they are doing by example. And once you have a better idea about the possibilities offered by a technology, invent a new project you can do by your own to practice and demonstrate this new skill. Showing a nice GitHub repository is invaluable.
Q. How do you keep up-to-date on your tech?
Estelle: This is written in the book 🙂 Just kidding. I read a lot of feeds, from influential people and researchers and join meetups and conferences as often as possible. I also follow the latest developments of the main packages I am using daily, novelties appear more quickly than you would expect in the open source community.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
Estelle: I try to write on my blog but posts are not that frequent : https://stellasia.github.io/ I also write stories on Medium from time to time : https://medium.com/@st3llasia
Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Estelle: The Neo4j blog is definitely a page to be checked regularly (https://neo4j.com/blog/) – or, even better, follow @Neo4j on your favourite social media, they are on Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitch, YouTube…
Estelle on why you should read this book: Click here and purchase it on Amazon by clicking on the link below the cover image.
