Lamis Chebbi is the author of Reactive Patterns with RxJS for Angular we got the chance to sit down and find out more about her experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What are your specialist tech areas?
Lamis: Angular, RxJS, TypeScript and JavaScript.
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Lamis: I started my career, 10 years ago, as a software engineer using object-oriented programming. Some years after I made a move to reactive programming and it is an completely different programming paradigm. The switch was not simple for me. There are a lot of tutorials and explanations about the tools and techniques but fewer resources about the reactive mindset and the difference with the imperative approach. That’s why I came up with the idea of this book to help developers understand reactive programming by example and start thinking reactively. The idea is to share my learning journey and the tricks that I found useful.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Lamis: Since I have been into reactive approaches and RxJS for the past few years, I didn’t research about the technical aspects. However, I spent two weeks learning some writing techniques.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Lamis: Managing my time efficiently was my biggest challenge. When I started I couldn’t manage together writing the book and my full-time job where I have a lot of responsibilities. I have also other activities that I do in my free time such as speaking at conferences. This was not only hard to handle in the beginning but also very stressful. I overcome this by planning and a good schedule, it helped me a lot in managing my time. I have also a very supportive family that always lifts me. Finally, I always tell myself that my book is worth the sacrifices, I’m working for my project and my dream.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Lamis: Nowadays the demand for real-time features, performant and reactive web applications is rising exponentially. I believe that reactive programming plays a crucial role in implementing those features at the lowest cost
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Lamis: This book explains reactive patterns based on concrete and real-world use cases and uses simple vocabulary. It also compares every time the imperative pattern to the reactive one to help the reader distinguish the difference and ensure a smooth transition between the imperative and reactive approaches. There are a lot of visual representations to help visual learners follow and demystify some complex concepts.
Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?
Lamis: I want my readers to start writing reactive code the right way and take advantage of this technique. Using RxJS does not make your code reactive by default. The patterns they will learn will help them put the reactive mindset on and improve the quality, performance and UX of their applications. Furthermore, the readers will understand deeply the behaviour of many RxJS operators and the use case of every operator.
Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Lamis: Practice makes perfect so practice what you read 🙂 Follow up constantly with new trends.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
Lamis: My Twitter account is the place where they can find all my updates: https://twitter.com/LamisChebbi
My medium account also contains my articles https://medium.com/@chebbi-lamis
Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Lamis: Here are some that I would like to recommend: https://rxjs.dev/ https://angular.io/
Q. How would you describe your author’s journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Lamis: Absolutely! So professional, helpful and kind people in every stage of the process 🙂
Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?
Lamis: The Angular community, I’m an Angular GDE and also a member of WWCode community and an auth0 ambassador
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
Lamis: Twitter and Reddit help me lot keep up with new trends
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Lamis: Prepare your outline first, the goal of each chapter and the main sections. Then work on one chapter at a time and try to devote daily time for writing
Q. What is the one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Lamis: Prepare a schedule and write every day even two sentences.
You can find Lamis Chebbi’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here
