Ravindra Akella is the author of Enterprise Application Development with C# 9 and .NET 5, we got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What is/are your specialist tech area(s)?
Ravindra: Systems design, Web development (REST APIs, SPA), C#
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Ravindra: My friend/author(Rishabh Verma) approached me with this idea as we already worked with another book before and I always felt there are fewer books with end-to-end application development and decided to join.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Ravindra: There were a lot of discussions on the structure, topics (close to 2 months), and sub-sections, and research was focused on covering the topics that are closer to building production applications.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Ravindra: As I am working full time and with homeschooling of my kid due to pandemic had to manage my time well. My goal was to spend 1-2 hours on weekdays on the book and 3-4 hours over the weekend.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Ravindra: C# and .NET have come a long way and continue to evolve and with Azure, they are a great combination to learn. For the future .NET 6 Preview is already released so definitely these technologies have a strong roadmap.
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Ravindra: The major differentiating factor is the enterprise application that is built throughout the book which helps in building in real-time application component by component, the architecture and the sample can be picked for any of the new web development work.
Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?
Ravindra: End to end web application development using C# and .NET 5, along the way understand various concepts like Caching, ORM, Asynchronous programming, testing and deployment.
Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Ravindra: Never stop writing code irrespective of your current role.
Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Ravindra: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fundamentals/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/introduction-to-aspnet-core?view=aspnetcore-5.0
For that matter any docs.microsoft.com is a great to place to begin with.
Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Ravindra: It was great working with Packt team starting from initial ideation to the execution, going through multiple iterations to get the right content. Would any day recommend Packt for aspiring authors.
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Ravindra: If there are multiple authors split the chapters accordingly, have an internal deadline much before the actual deadline so that co-authors can do a peer review, and most importantly plan to work on it every day rather than doing the bulk of work over weekends.
Q. What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Ravindra: Read a lot, let the initial drafts of chapters come out quickly and then iterate.
You can find Ravindra’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here
Enterprise Application Development with C# 9 and .NET 5– Available on Amazon.com
