Book Review: Web API Development with ASP.NET Core 8

Another book that I was recently sent for review by the PackT people was Web API Development with ASP.NET Core 8: Learn techniques, patterns, and tools for building high-performance, robust, and scalable web APIs.

Author

The author is Xiaodi Yan, who is a fellow longer-term Microsoft MVP and an experienced software developer, focussing on .NET, AI, DevOps and all things cloud-related. You’ll also find him on LinkedIn Learning as an instructor.

During the Covid lockdowns, I started to get involved in attending the New Zealand Chinese IT user group meetings that were being held online. I thought it would be a great opportunity to keep trying to improve my Mandarin, particularly with technical content. Xiaodi Yan was one of the people who made me feel most welcome.

The Book

This is a very comprehensive book. I remember the author posting about his relief at having finished it, and I now know why. It’s a huge book and it took me a while to go through it. Even though I did so, I think this will be a great ongoing reference in the future when I work on projects that are implementing APIs this way. The structure of the book lends itself to being a great ongoing reference.

I liked to see so many code examples. They really helped with understanding the points that he was making.

One area that I’ve always felt a bit weak on is dependency injection. I’m a developer by background but spend most of my days working in data, and dependency injection was one of those patterns that came along when I was less focussed on it. He explained it so well.

Lately, with any projects I’ve been involved with, .NET Core is usually the target. I particularly loved the fact that that’s what he targeted in this book.

Like many books, there are a few further edits that might have helped. But overall, it’s a masterful work.

Summary

What a great book. I can’t imagine how long it must have taken to write. And how long it must have taken to get all the required thoughts in the appropriate structure and order to make it such a good reference.

It’s not one for my usual data audience, but anyone involved with Web API development should check it out.

9 out of 10

2024-04-25