Finally - My first book got published

Jürgen Gutsch - 01 February, 2021

I always had the idea to write a book. Twelve or thirteen years ago, Stefan Falz told me not to do it, because it is a lot of effort and takes a lot of your time. Even if my book is just a small one and smaller than Stefan's books for sure, now I know what he meant, I guess :-)

How it started

My journey writing a book starts in fall 2018 when I started the "Customizing ASP.NET Core" series. A reader asked me to bundle the series as a book. I took my time to thought about it and started to work on it in July 2019. The initial idea to use LeanPub and create a book the open source way was good but But there was no pressure, no timeline, and that project was had lower priority besides life and other stuff. The release of ASP.NET Core was a good event to put some more pressure on it. From September last year on I started to update all the contents and samples to ASP.NET Core 5.0. I also updated the text in a way that it matches a book more than a blog series.

Actually my very first book is a compilation of the old blog series, but updated to ASP.NET Core 5.0 and it includes an additional thirteenth chapter that wasn't part of the original series.

I was almost done end of October and ready to publish it around the .NET Conf 2020 when .NET 5 and ASP.NET Core were announced. Then I decided to try an experiment:

How it went

At that time, I did a technical review of a book about Blazor for Packt and I decided to ask Packt if my book is worth it to get published by Packt. They said yes and wanted to publish it. That was awesome. My idea was to improve the quality of the book, to have professional editors, and reviewers and most important to not do the publishing and the marketing by myself.

The downside of this decision: I wasn't able to publish the book around the .NET Conf 2020. Packt started to work on it and it was a really impressive experience:

  • An editor worked on it to make the texts more "booky" than "bloggy", and I had to review and rework some texts
  • A fellow MVP Toi B. Wright did the technical review, and I had a lot more to fix.
  • Another technical reviewer executed all the samples and snippets, and I had to fix some small issues.
  • A copy editor went through all the chapters and had feedback about formatting.
  • In the meanwhile I had to work on the front matter and the preface.

I also never thought about a foreword of my book until I worked on the preface. I didn't want to write the foreword by myself and had the right person in mind.

I asked Damien Bowden the smartest and coolest ASP.NET Core security guru I know. He also is a fellow MVP and a famous blogger. His posts got shared many times and often mentioned in the ASP.NET Community Standup. It's always a pleasure to talk to him and we had a lot of fun at the MVP summits in Redmond and Bellevue.

Thanks Damien for writing this awesome foreword :-)

How it is right now

Sure, my very first book is just a compilation of the old blog series, but updated to ASP.NET Core 5.0 and it includes an additional thirteenth chapter that wasn't part of the original series:

  1. Customizing Logging
  2. Customizing App Configuration
  3. Customizing Dependency Injection
  4. Configuring and Customizing HTTPS
  5. Using IHostedService and BackgroundService
  6. Writing Custom Middleware
  7. Content negotiation using custom OutputFormatter
  8. Managing inputs with custom ModelBinders
  9. Creating custom ActionFilter
  10. Creating custom TagHelpers
  11. Configuring WebHostBuilder
  12. Using different Hosting models
  13. Working with Endpoint Routing

This book also contains details about ASP.NET Core 3.1. I'm mentioning 3.1, if it differs from 5.0. Because ASP.NET Core 3.1 is a LTS version and some companies definitely will stay on LTS.

Packt helped me to higher the quality of the contents and it now is is a compact cook book with 13 recipes you should know about ASP.NET Core.

It is definitely a book for ASP.NET Core beginners, who already know C# and the main concepts about ASP.NET Core

Where to get it

Last Saturday Packt published it on Amazon as Kindle edition and as paperback

Damien, do you see your name below the title? ;-)

I guess it will be as available on Packt as well soon, for those of you who have a Packt subscription.

Would be awesome, if you would drop a review as soon you read it

Thanks

I would like to say thanks to some persons, who helped me do this.

  • At first I say thanks to my family, friends, and colleagues who supported me and motivated me to finish the work.

  • I also say thanks to Packt. They did a great job supporting me and they added a lot more value to the book. I also like the cover design.

  • I say thanks again to Damien for that great foreword

  • Also thanks to the developer community and the readers of my blog, since this book is mainly powered by the community.

What's next?

My plan is to keep this book up-to-date. I will update the samples and concepts with every new major version.

For now, I will focus on my blog again. I've written almost nothing in the past six months. In any case, I already have an idea for another book :-)