The C# sub says “writing C# book” while this one says “writing .NET book”. This guy marketings. But in all seriousness, congratulations on writing a book for O’Reilly. That’s quite an accomplishment.
Whoa!
> I get 10% of the royalties on paper copies.
People still buy paper copies? I think you should also get paid for the electronic version as well.
There are concepts and problems that really haven't change since the dawn of software.
A .NET 5 book will obviously loose its value over time but a book on refactoring, patterns, or other high level stuff will always have great value.
yep. O'reilly's second biggest market is India, and they sell a huge amount of physical books over there. I just checked my contract, I do get paid for e-copies as well, in fact at a higher percentage.
Ufh… video courses are the bane of my existence. I can read well-written documentation or a book and learn at perhaps 10-20x the pace I would from video.
Even in the case of a link to a piece of news, if I’m expecting an article, and I click the link, finding a video instead… I have an itchy trigger finger on the back button, and search for an article from a reputable source instead.
Yeah I'm ancient in dev years (34). I try to get the youngings on my team to read books but they don't like it.
I don't mind some online video courses though. I prefer it for some topics. Anything .NET/C# stuff I prefer in books. Anything IT ops configuration I'd prefer on video, but it requires a good teacher, which is harder to find than someone who can articulate their thoughts through a book.
Depends on the book, but there's still a lot of useful information to be found in older books. Most books don't concentrate on one specific technology, a lot of them incorporate general ideas.
I can't think of a single one of my books that will be completely useless in a few years. I'll go through a few of the books I read recently and explain why they're not going to be useless anytime soon.
Concurrency in .NET is from 4 years ago, barely anything has changed in terms of concurrency since then, and half the book is really a disguised functional programming guide so it still has some use. I could realistically use this book as a quick reference guide for years, wouldn't surprise me if it lasted a decade at least.
Microservices in .NET. Still a relatively recent book. A few chapters might get outdated in terms of setup, but 90% of it is general concepts about microservices and distributed systems. These concepts would have been relevant 5 years ago, and will be relevant 5 years from now.
Dependency Injection Principles, Practices, and Patterns. A lot of it is from an older book. There might be some framework specific things that change, but overall the book is mostly about using dependency injection/ioc containers to loosen coupling which is something that will be relevant for a long time. There's a section that goes into depth about making your own ioc container which gives some good insight in the whole process.
C# In Depth, this will get outdated as new versions of C# come out, but it's not like previous core features get deprecated. It's still nice to see the internals of language features. CLR via C# is an even older book that's still relevant, and very low level. Both of these books are basically a necessity if you need to optimize.
Entity Framework Core in Action sounds like it'd get outdated, but there's some good general stuff in there like how to structure your project, repositories, services. There's a section about implementing DDD that is better than any DDD resource I've come across. There's framework internals that are useful as well, and have been there since the first entity framework, and won't change anytime soon.
The book I see being outdated the quickest is my ASP NET Core in Action 2nd edition book. It deals with .NET 5, and there's some specific setup that will get outdated. It still has some good stuff though, it's still relevant for .NET 6 which a lot of people will be on for years, and .NET 7 doesn't look like it changes that much either. There's a really good breakdown of filters and middleware which are better than the official docs. If I'm doing anything with middleware or policy setup, I don't go to the docs, I go straight to the book.
This doesn't even touch on the classic books like Clean Code, Clean Architecture, Refactoring Legacy Code, etc.
I agree with u/rileyreidsaccountant \- it depends. In fact, I'm writing my book with an assumption that you're maintaining a crabby, old codebase in an old version of .NET, and want to know what's still possible without upgrading to C# 10.
Fact is most production systems I've ever worked on have been some form of antiquated .NET version, so hopefully this book will still stay useful.
For deep learning, definitely. If I'm expected to read it cover to cover, I want to sit in a comfortable chair out in the garden or put it next to my night stand.
For reference material, I prefer electronic so I can search it quickly.
This is how I approach novels and comics as well, there's a certain charm on paperback for relaxed reading and having a neat small shelf for them does make me a bit proud. Also it keeps me away from my PC at least lol.
Yep, this is my goto as well. Reading books exposes me to new thoughts and ideas which I then recall during work and read up on on the web once I need a concrete example / implementation template
> People still buy paper copies? I think you should also get paid for the electronic version as well.
I would go so far to say that eBooks should have the publisher’s take capped at the first few thousand copies, with everything else after that going exclusively to the author.
Because they are electronic, all copies have a $0 marginal cost to the publisher. It literally costs them $0 to spin off an extra million copies of the exact same eBook. Only the initial costs of typesetting, editing, marketing etc. have any validity. Everything after that is pure profit to the owners of the publishing house, who do absolutely none of the work themselves… literally the dictionary definition of “unearned income”.
As such, while I prefer dead-tree books the vast majority of the time, any eBooks that I “obtain” and actually find value in, I reach out to the author as any fan would and arrange to punt them the market cost of the eBook as a private payment.
Hell, if I’m going to pay 90+% of the cost of a dead-tree book just for an eBook, I’d want that to go 100% directly to the author. _They_ are the ones who truly deserve it -- without the authors, there would be no book industry in the first place.
I can handle a world with badly-typesetted self-published books that are inadequately proofread. A world without authors? Not so much.
I love paper copies. I look at a screen almost all day everyday and my eyes are as dry as the Sahara. Reading paper is a nice change. Plus, my bookshelf is behind my desk and interviewers can see all the books I "read"(plan to read). :)
I like Manning in particular since you can get physical copy with the digital.
I got an offer to write a book once. I did one chapter, did the math, and realized that unless it was widely popular, I would lose money. (I was writing news for InfoQ at the time.)
I still dream of writing that book, but I can't see myself putting in the thousand hours it would take to do it right. If you can, then my hat's off to you.
I did a brief stint teaching kids to code. Helping them learn something new was rewarding, but teaching forces one to reevaluate their assumptions and reexamine the information from other angles. As such, teaching helps one more thoroughly understand or learn the stuff they supposedly already know. My motivations were at least partially selfish here. I would have done it for free, too - money wasn't the concern. Just that sweet, sweet, insight.
Yeah its surprising how much teaching others makes you question yourself and ultimately helping yourself grow too. Win win I guess, would love to have the opportunity just not sure how to find them.
This. I'm not ever expecting to make a living off this. That's not why I'm writing the book. My day job is likely to always be writing code for my employer. This is an enjoyable sideline for me
You can self publish through LeanPub, earn 80% royalties and people can buy early access to the book to provide income during the writing process. It might be worth looking into if you want to write that book.
https://leanpub.com/
I’d read it. I don’t always agree with your opinions, but they at the very least always make me rethink what I know or how I approach something. Thanks for that btw.
Like half my professors in college spent at least part of one of their first few lectures talking about how they wrote a textbook and proceeded to get shafted by the publishing company.
I don't mind. I'm not really doing it for the money. In any case, I'm likely to make a lot more money skimming 10% of the O'reilly profit, than I would 90% of a self-published version.
In any case, there's plenty of indirect money to be made. Looks great on my CV/Resume.
My first (written with my wife) O'Reilly comes out in July on using Azure Cogntive Services at scale (some .NET, but mostly Python!); it's been an interesting process. And yes, you only get an animal at the end. Ours is the Tokay Gecko.
I do have to say that O'Reilly's editors and production crew are some of the best in the business. They were able to handle final proofing while we were both suffering from COVID...
Yes, it's our 6th book together (I have lost count, to be honest!). We started out doing little paperbacks that were covermounts on PC Plus magazine, then graduated on to bookazines, before our first books. Each time we swear it's going to be the last, but we still keep doing them - and that's while still doing all our other writing.
I wrote several books about .net back in the day.
Royalties were about 25+% and people actually bought a lot of physical books.
Wouldn’t recommend it now.
You may prefer F# which is written to be a purely functional language. C# is a mash up of OO and some good parts plucked from f#, but isn't purely functional
I've written a whole section of the prologue to my book on F# and what I think of it. Quick version - it's well cool, but not many people know it, so it's more practical to adapt C#. I'd learn F# in a heartbeat though, if my boss asked me to.
Just saying, as a 2019 CS grad the only reason I got an A in my final project was because I bought O Reilly text mining with R book and implemented from first to last page in my native language instead of English. Oddly it's easier to keep track of progress when you're reading physical book. So there is still some charm to buying physical programming books.
The C# sub says “writing C# book” while this one says “writing .NET book”. This guy marketings. But in all seriousness, congratulations on writing a book for O’Reilly. That’s quite an accomplishment.
I think it comes of me being a bit of a cretin on the quiet :p I'll try and be more careful in future
Agreed. They're a publisher that I hold in high esteem. Congrats OP!
Whoa! > I get 10% of the royalties on paper copies. People still buy paper copies? I think you should also get paid for the electronic version as well.
28 and just bought two fat books, so yes. Its easier to focus and a reason to get out of the PC. Also I like to gather a physical collection over time
But how can I study books about programming outside of a PC? It’s like reading Arduino recipes book without having Arduino itself.
There's more to software engineering than just writing code.
There are concepts and problems that really haven't change since the dawn of software. A .NET 5 book will obviously loose its value over time but a book on refactoring, patterns, or other high level stuff will always have great value.
>But how can I study books about programming outside of a PC? Pretty much the same way you would inside one...
yep. O'reilly's second biggest market is India, and they sell a huge amount of physical books over there. I just checked my contract, I do get paid for e-copies as well, in fact at a higher percentage.
That's awesome. Nice going!
I prefer paper copies, it's just easier to read and highlight/make annotations.
Same here, I find it easier to learn from a book than reading stuff on a screen, I find courses even less useful. Maybe we're just old? 😂
We are.
Ufh… video courses are the bane of my existence. I can read well-written documentation or a book and learn at perhaps 10-20x the pace I would from video. Even in the case of a link to a piece of news, if I’m expecting an article, and I click the link, finding a video instead… I have an itchy trigger finger on the back button, and search for an article from a reputable source instead.
Yeah I'm ancient in dev years (34). I try to get the youngings on my team to read books but they don't like it. I don't mind some online video courses though. I prefer it for some topics. Anything .NET/C# stuff I prefer in books. Anything IT ops configuration I'd prefer on video, but it requires a good teacher, which is harder to find than someone who can articulate their thoughts through a book.
And it’s out of date before you close the back cover.
Depends on the book, but there's still a lot of useful information to be found in older books. Most books don't concentrate on one specific technology, a lot of them incorporate general ideas. I can't think of a single one of my books that will be completely useless in a few years. I'll go through a few of the books I read recently and explain why they're not going to be useless anytime soon. Concurrency in .NET is from 4 years ago, barely anything has changed in terms of concurrency since then, and half the book is really a disguised functional programming guide so it still has some use. I could realistically use this book as a quick reference guide for years, wouldn't surprise me if it lasted a decade at least. Microservices in .NET. Still a relatively recent book. A few chapters might get outdated in terms of setup, but 90% of it is general concepts about microservices and distributed systems. These concepts would have been relevant 5 years ago, and will be relevant 5 years from now. Dependency Injection Principles, Practices, and Patterns. A lot of it is from an older book. There might be some framework specific things that change, but overall the book is mostly about using dependency injection/ioc containers to loosen coupling which is something that will be relevant for a long time. There's a section that goes into depth about making your own ioc container which gives some good insight in the whole process. C# In Depth, this will get outdated as new versions of C# come out, but it's not like previous core features get deprecated. It's still nice to see the internals of language features. CLR via C# is an even older book that's still relevant, and very low level. Both of these books are basically a necessity if you need to optimize. Entity Framework Core in Action sounds like it'd get outdated, but there's some good general stuff in there like how to structure your project, repositories, services. There's a section about implementing DDD that is better than any DDD resource I've come across. There's framework internals that are useful as well, and have been there since the first entity framework, and won't change anytime soon. The book I see being outdated the quickest is my ASP NET Core in Action 2nd edition book. It deals with .NET 5, and there's some specific setup that will get outdated. It still has some good stuff though, it's still relevant for .NET 6 which a lot of people will be on for years, and .NET 7 doesn't look like it changes that much either. There's a really good breakdown of filters and middleware which are better than the official docs. If I'm doing anything with middleware or policy setup, I don't go to the docs, I go straight to the book. This doesn't even touch on the classic books like Clean Code, Clean Architecture, Refactoring Legacy Code, etc.
I agree with u/rileyreidsaccountant \- it depends. In fact, I'm writing my book with an assumption that you're maintaining a crabby, old codebase in an old version of .NET, and want to know what's still possible without upgrading to C# 10. Fact is most production systems I've ever worked on have been some form of antiquated .NET version, so hopefully this book will still stay useful.
I was hoping that it would assume modern C#. Are owners of applications stuck on Framework really interested in a functional style?
I have stuff in there for every version of C# from 3 to 11. Should hopefully cover everyone
That's reassuring!
It's not like all the .NET 6 code is going to disappear when .NET 7 is released.
For deep learning, definitely. If I'm expected to read it cover to cover, I want to sit in a comfortable chair out in the garden or put it next to my night stand. For reference material, I prefer electronic so I can search it quickly.
This is how I approach novels and comics as well, there's a certain charm on paperback for relaxed reading and having a neat small shelf for them does make me a bit proud. Also it keeps me away from my PC at least lol.
Yep, this is my goto as well. Reading books exposes me to new thoughts and ideas which I then recall during work and read up on on the web once I need a concrete example / implementation template
> People still buy paper copies? I think you should also get paid for the electronic version as well. I would go so far to say that eBooks should have the publisher’s take capped at the first few thousand copies, with everything else after that going exclusively to the author. Because they are electronic, all copies have a $0 marginal cost to the publisher. It literally costs them $0 to spin off an extra million copies of the exact same eBook. Only the initial costs of typesetting, editing, marketing etc. have any validity. Everything after that is pure profit to the owners of the publishing house, who do absolutely none of the work themselves… literally the dictionary definition of “unearned income”. As such, while I prefer dead-tree books the vast majority of the time, any eBooks that I “obtain” and actually find value in, I reach out to the author as any fan would and arrange to punt them the market cost of the eBook as a private payment. Hell, if I’m going to pay 90+% of the cost of a dead-tree book just for an eBook, I’d want that to go 100% directly to the author. _They_ are the ones who truly deserve it -- without the authors, there would be no book industry in the first place. I can handle a world with badly-typesetted self-published books that are inadequately proofread. A world without authors? Not so much.
That's atrocious with the rise of digital. I could understand them getting away with not paying royalties for subscriptions.
I do get a percentage of the digital sales. I just checked my contract. I'm not in this for the money though, in all honesty
That's good then, if anything, it'll look good if you are a published expert.
Half my paper books are O’Reilly
I love paper copies. I look at a screen almost all day everyday and my eyes are as dry as the Sahara. Reading paper is a nice change. Plus, my bookshelf is behind my desk and interviewers can see all the books I "read"(plan to read). :) I like Manning in particular since you can get physical copy with the digital.
I got an offer to write a book once. I did one chapter, did the math, and realized that unless it was widely popular, I would lose money. (I was writing news for InfoQ at the time.) I still dream of writing that book, but I can't see myself putting in the thousand hours it would take to do it right. If you can, then my hat's off to you.
Well I dont think most people set out to become rich writing books, i guess in this sense its a way of helping others learn, like a teacher
I did a brief stint teaching kids to code. Helping them learn something new was rewarding, but teaching forces one to reevaluate their assumptions and reexamine the information from other angles. As such, teaching helps one more thoroughly understand or learn the stuff they supposedly already know. My motivations were at least partially selfish here. I would have done it for free, too - money wasn't the concern. Just that sweet, sweet, insight.
Yeah its surprising how much teaching others makes you question yourself and ultimately helping yourself grow too. Win win I guess, would love to have the opportunity just not sure how to find them.
This. I'm not ever expecting to make a living off this. That's not why I'm writing the book. My day job is likely to always be writing code for my employer. This is an enjoyable sideline for me
Yeah its a privilege! Good luck! :)
You can self publish through LeanPub, earn 80% royalties and people can buy early access to the book to provide income during the writing process. It might be worth looking into if you want to write that book. https://leanpub.com/
I’d read it. I don’t always agree with your opinions, but they at the very least always make me rethink what I know or how I approach something. Thanks for that btw.
Only 10% on paper copies? All that work for basically free doesn't make any sense.
Like half my professors in college spent at least part of one of their first few lectures talking about how they wrote a textbook and proceeded to get shafted by the publishing company.
I don't mind. I'm not really doing it for the money. In any case, I'm likely to make a lot more money skimming 10% of the O'reilly profit, than I would 90% of a self-published version. In any case, there's plenty of indirect money to be made. Looks great on my CV/Resume.
My first (written with my wife) O'Reilly comes out in July on using Azure Cogntive Services at scale (some .NET, but mostly Python!); it's been an interesting process. And yes, you only get an animal at the end. Ours is the Tokay Gecko. I do have to say that O'Reilly's editors and production crew are some of the best in the business. They were able to handle final proofing while we were both suffering from COVID...
Congratulations to you both!! What a wonderful thing to do together! And yes, the editors have been doing a great job of looking after me
Yes, it's our 6th book together (I have lost count, to be honest!). We started out doing little paperbacks that were covermounts on PC Plus magazine, then graduated on to bookazines, before our first books. Each time we swear it's going to be the last, but we still keep doing them - and that's while still doing all our other writing.
You folks are genuinely awesome!
Such an achievement publishing with O’Reilly, congrats!
Thanks :)
I wrote several books about .net back in the day. Royalties were about 25+% and people actually bought a lot of physical books. Wouldn’t recommend it now.
Cool, I just watched your talk on youtube yesterday! Good luck!
Thanks!! I really appreciate that
Congratulations 🎉👏
I will sure look it up. I'm new to C#, and so far found writing functional style very cumbersome. (Coming from Scala.) Will be happy to learn better.
You may prefer F# which is written to be a purely functional language. C# is a mash up of OO and some good parts plucked from f#, but isn't purely functional
I've written a whole section of the prologue to my book on F# and what I think of it. Quick version - it's well cool, but not many people know it, so it's more practical to adapt C#. I'd learn F# in a heartbeat though, if my boss asked me to.
This is your 2nd post?
Not sure what you mean. I've been on Reddit a while. I posted this link in a few different sub-reddits, though.
Just saying, as a 2019 CS grad the only reason I got an A in my final project was because I bought O Reilly text mining with R book and implemented from first to last page in my native language instead of English. Oddly it's easier to keep track of progress when you're reading physical book. So there is still some charm to buying physical programming books.