This interview with NHibernate Succinctly author Ricardo Peres is part of a series of Q&A blog posts with our Succinctly series authors.
Why write a book for Syncfusion?
The first book I wrote was NHibernate Succinctly. Back then—and to some degree, this remains the same today—there wasn’t much documentation or reference material about NHibernate, just some scattered blog posts here and there. I had been involved in the NHibernate project for some time and I wanted to help change this. I was very impressed with Syncfusion’s Succinctly series, which is something that Syncfusion offers for the benefit of all the development communities. So I thought, why not give it a try?
After that came a related technology, Entity Framework, which is Microsoft’s answer to data access. It shares a lot of concepts and features with NHibernate, so it made sense to write something similar in structure and how concepts were presented. Next, Microsoft Unity, an Inversion of Control container, and finally a book on ASP.NET multitenancy.
ASP.NET is my favorite subject (I am a Microsoft MVP on ASP.NET), and I think it is a great framework—either Web Forms or MVC—so I was really excited about it!
Are these books your first technical manuals?
In structured format for public use, yes, these are the first ones I’ve written, but I have been blogging for some time now. I also do lots of writing for internal use at the company I work for, CRITICAL Software, and I am also a trainer in my (not so) spare time, so I write training materials, slides, and the like.
What is your favorite outdated technology?
Are books and CDs outdated? I hope not, because I like to read hard copies rather than digital formats, and listen to music from start to the end! But, bookstores and specialized music stores are becoming rare, at least in Portugal, everything is moving to big stores. I also miss cameras, nowadays everything is digital and pictures tend to remain forgotten in disks instead of printed.
What have you learned since writing your e-books?
Well, I have learned a lot, actually! Not just overall organization and method techniques, but the need to write with a great degree of confidence and interest on a technical subject made me really dig into it and explore lots of options that I hadn’t previously considered. I actually learned from my books! I had to make my examples simple so that they could be easily understood, but not so simple that readers would lose their interest. Probably the biggest challenge was to please both newcomers as well as more seasoned readers, and I hope I succeeded in this.
Do you have another reference that you would recommend to people interested in Microsoft Unity, NHibernate, Entity Framework Code First, or Multitenancy with ASP.NET?
There are lots of them! I write about these—and other—topics in my blog, Development With A Dot. Interested readers can also find interesting information on Entity Framework in the One Unicorn blog and Julie Lerman’s Data Farm. For ASP.NET, there are quite a few; I would recommend Filip Woj’s blog, StrathWeb, Scott Hanselman’s blog, Jerrie Pelser’s site, David Fowler’s Unhandled Exception, and Rick Strahl’s Web Log. Unfortunately, Fabio Maulo and Alexander Zaytsev are taking some time away from blogging, but their blogs still contain lots of useful information. And, of course, all the other titles in the Succinctly series are must-reads!
Succinctly series author Ricardo Peres