Announcing my book Introducing Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr)
It's been a tough year! My blog hasn't received much of my attention. I am sorry, my dear readers. But I am delighted to announce a new book named Introducing Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) published by Apress with a foreword written by Yaron Schneider, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft and Dapr Co-creator.
The book is now available as an eBook and in Paperback on apress.com.
How did I end up writing a technical book?
Let's rewind to early 2020 when COVID-19 started getting attention. At that time I was in-between projects and I had a few client opportunities that eventually failed because of all the craze built by the pandemic. In a few days, MVP Summit was canceled. It couldn't get any worse.
Fortunately, I had a lot of spare time to learn and try new and exciting things. One of them was Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) that I covered in a blog post that became very popular. Not much after that Apress contacted me with a proposal to write a book. I've always wanted to write a technical book but somehow I couldn't squeeze enough time in. Well, this was the perfect chance for me!
However, shortly after we finalized all details with the publisher I started working full time on a new project and I had to combine the book-writing with it. So I had to put in long hours, each and every day. Fast forward a year from then, the book is published and available. From my perspective, that was a year of lockdowns well-spent!
What is this book about?
When I first heard about Dapr I was amazed by the simple concept of reusing its building blocks that make the development of distributed applications simpler. Essentially, you can do more with less.
I always try to think and understand things conceptually. And I've been doing so since I learned about design patterns. Dapr brought kind of the same feelings as it bundles ready-to-use patterns for your Microservices applications out of the box.
Introducing Dapr aims to guide you on your way of learning Dapr. You don't need to have a lot of experience working with Microservices, container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, or any common patterns. I tried to provide introductory chapters for all that. After that, the book walks you through every building block of Dapr in detail. The last part of the book is dedicated to integrating Dapr within various frameworks and programming models like ASP.NET Core, Azure Functions, and Azure Logic Apps.
I tried to provide a lot of examples. Most of them are in .NET Core while a handful of them are based on Node.js (to emphasize the language-agnostic properties of Dapr). Dapr is cloud-agnostic as well but I stuck to a single public cloud platform, that is Microsoft Azure. I couldn't help it... 😊
I want to thank all Dapr members and maintainers for being so helpful and welcoming in the Dapr community. The book couldn't have been possible without them. I want to also thank Mark Russinovich and Yaron Schneider who were among the first to receive an early copy of the book. Then the first early review came in:
Introducing Dapr is a fantastic guide to getting you started on leveraging Dapr to supercharge your cloud native applications.
―Mark Russinovich
Azure CTO and Technical Fellow
Microsoft