This interview with OWIN Succinctly author Ugo Lattanzi is part of a series of Q&A blog posts with our Succinctly series authors.
Why write a book for Syncfusion?
I’ve never been a big fan of books with thousands of pages. From my point of view, a technical book must offer everything that is needed to understand the scenario, the framework, or whatever the argument of the book is, leaving the proper space to readers to discover and implement what they have read. Moreover, the web is full of information: there are books, articles, blogs, Twitter, and thousand other sources to find good resources.
Looking to my experience, I never read a book completely, I always take the important part of it and investigate deeply during the implementation. In the modern life of the developer, there’s no time to read a book with 600 pages. That’s why I like the Syncfusion approach.
Are these books your first technical manuals?
In terms of books, yes. In terms of technical articles, I have written a lot of resources starting with my blog (http://tostring.it), and branched out to several vendors like Microsoft, Redgate, and so on. OWIN Succinctly was my first book, and I’m very happy with the results. In fact I’m working on a new book about ASP.NET MVC 6.
What do you enjoy outside of software development?
When I’m not involved in my job, I love to spend time with my son Tommaso and enjoy sports. During the winter I like to say, “I’m a snowboarder,” and during spring and summer, I say, “I’m a biker.” I love the beautiful Italian mountains.
Ugo Lattanzi snowboarding
Ugo Lattanzi biking
Unfortunately, I’ve not so much time for either, and that’s probably the main reason why my results in those areas are not so brilliant.
What have you learned since writing OWIN Succinctly?
It doesn’t matter how well you know a framework. There is always something to learn, especially if the book is based on something that’s not released yet like ASP.NET 5 (the latest book I’m working on). The new version of ASP.NET is deeply different from the previous one, so you have to start from the beginning and that’s a challenge if you are writing a book in 100 pages. To make the right choice about the thousands of arguments is really difficult. As a developer I’d like to share everything, but in most cases it doesn’t make sense to do so.
Do you have another reference that you would recommend to people interested in OWIN or ASP.NET 5?
It’s not so easy to answer to this question. Probably the easiest way could be to follow the team members on Twitter (Scott Hanselman, Damian Edwards, David Fowler, and so on), and, of course, to watch the specific repositories on GitHub (http://github.com/aspnet). Another good resource is the official website (http://www.asp.net/vnext) where you can find good articles and videos about this framework. Last but not least: be an attendee of the “Web European Conference” (http://webnextconf.eu) which I co-founded.