Most developers we know are constantly learning new things and growing their skills. Jort Rodenburg has been a book reviewer for Manning for several years and was approached to write a book on C# which he thought would be a great opportunity to grow. His book, Code like a Pro in C#, was a great learning experience for him and is intended to help bridge the gap between beginner and advanced developers. 

We discussed the process of writing the book, some of the resources he used and his favorite chapter. What is the best way you have found to grow as a developer? Let us know on Twitter at @dotnet_Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of adventures in dot net. I'm Sean Kleber, your host. And with me today are your 2 cohosts, Caleb Wells. Hey. Caleb, looks like you have power.

Am I here? Am I actually in my office with a normal setup? I am. Yeah. We were actually heading to golf course to stay with my in laws for a few days because we've been with my parents for about 2 weeks, and we got a call from our neighbors.

We got power back. And so we changed course and came home and spent the evening cleaning up some and turning the water back on, all the fun stuff. And back at my desk, I love my desk and my chair and my setup, so it's gonna be back. You must have been one of the first ones to get power back on in New Orleans. Actually, we were one of the last ones in the bowl.

And there there are parts outside that's not in between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain that still have power, and they could be, you know, 2 weeks to 3 months. But we were one of the last streets in the bowl that you call New Orleans that got power for some reason. So Well, they they would thought it was gonna be quite a while before you got power, so it must have been done done a really good job of getting that back on. Yeah. They they really did did good with the city, and and they initially focused on, like, hospitals and grocery stores and, you know, first responders and making sure all that stuff worked the first few days.

But the transformer coming from and if you haven't seen the news, like, some of the towers fell because of Ida coming from the west. What they ended up doing was they they went and pulled power from the east instead of taking all the time to get it back up on the west, and then they'll reroute stuff, I guess, as they get more things done. But, yeah, we're back. So Any damage to your house? Limited.

Some fence damage and something piledripped my car and put a huge dent in it during the storm. But other than that, we're good. No no roof damage, no water damage, so we're we're blessed there. Then we got Wai Lou. How are you doing?

You doing better than Caleb? Yeah. Yeah. No. No NASA disasters here.

So Just quarantine. Yeah. Yeah. It's fine, man. Getting a bit sick of that now.

But, Yeah. The cases aren't going down, so we'll probably last things a little bit longer. We've got some interesting stuff here in the US. Biden, I don't I don't think he can officially tell everybody you have to get vaccinated, but they basically put out a a press release and and said, you need to get vaccinated. And they told companies that if you want funding from us and you work the government in any way, shape, or form, and you have more than a 100 people, they have to be vaccinated.

Yeah. They're getting that serious now then. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's gonna be interesting.

But, you know, hey. Maybe some good stuff come out of it. Right? Yeah. Well, you know, I could see both sides of it, but, you know, we want this thing to be over.

Agree. Yeah. We'll never get rid of it. Yeah. We gotta get rid of it.

Otherwise, the economy is just gonna just not come back to us full screen. Mhmm. Anyways, let's talk tech. Alright? Yes.

Hey. How about our guest today, York Rodenburg? Welcome, York. Hi. How's it going?

Hey. Good. So why don't you, introduce yourself and tell us what you do and how you got into, dot net development? Those kinds of things. Sure.

So I'm Gerronberg. I am a software engineer currently at Acronis in Phoenix, Arizona. I first got into the whole dot net world around 2016, I wanna say, when I, started working for Fujifilm in North Carolina, and they were using c sharp, and I had not really touched c sharp before. So I basically came in with a little bit of Python, some Java knowledge, and that clearly wasn't cutting it. So I had to learn c sharp, and I didn't quite look back since.

Well, you're kinda like a newcomer, you know, compared to the rest of us. Right. Yeah. Myself. Well, but you obviously know what you're doing.

You you're stuck with c sharp. Sure. It's the right move. Right. Exactly.

It's the only move. Right? And you've you've actually written a book for for Manning. I have. Yes.

Yeah. It's called code like a pro in c sharp. So if you wanna code like a pro in c sharp, read Code Like a Pro in c sharp. It's that easy? Just do it.

I mean, you have to read the book for that. Right? I'm not gonna tell you the secrets like this. So what was it like writing a book? So it's an interesting experience.

I'll put it that way. It is not something I really anticipated doing, but the opportunity presented itself. And I said, sure. Why not? I severely underestimated the amount of time that goes into writing a book.

My initial estimate was, you know, for it's a 400 page book, more or less, to be done in about 6 to 8 months, which the publisher did say that's a bit optimistic. And after 6 to 8 months, I thought I was done. I had written all my chapters, had all the code there, and then the review process starts, and 2 years later that. That. Right.

Basically, yeah. So in the end, it took 2 years, and it finally came out, last summer. But it it's a very interesting experience. You'll learn a lot about about writing, really, about how can you best present your ideas, whether they're good or not, to your audience. And it it definitely has helped me in my day to day work as well as far as communication skills go and just documentation even.

Because nobody really wants to write documentation, but it does help if you've written a book, basically. It it makes it a little bit easier maybe. Yeah. You know, I hadn't actually thought of that fact, but I can see how that would make a difference. Right.

Right. The more comfortable you are with writing, the easier it comes to you, right, or the less time you have to to think on it. So Right. It kinda comes more natural. I don't know if it will ever come natural to me, but it comes more natural.

Yeah. And that that's assuming that you're going to write documentation, which that that is a big assumption, of course. And kind of kind of follows into this saying, you know, if you wanna learn how to how to do something, teach it. So it makes you really kinda get into things a lot more in-depth and cover things. So, I mean, can you give us a little high level overview of what kind of things the book covers?

Sure. So the the behind the book is there's kinda 2 target personas that it markets itself to. So you have the the c sharp developer who's developed a c sharp for maybe a year, and it's kinda looking at all these c sharp resource out there. And, you know, we have plenty of books on c sharp, but mostly they are, you know, start programming 101 with C Sharp. This is how you write a full loop.

This is what a variable is. Or you've got your C Sharp in-depth where it's 800 pages of really dense, advanced material that there's nothing in the middle there. So this kinda helps you guide you along to some of the more advanced resources. And then there's the aspect of programmers who are familiar with a different language, preferably an old language, coming into c Sharp. Like, what are the things you need to know to get quickly up to speed with C Sharp, go like a pro if you will, without having to go through, oh, this is how I declare an array.

This is what an object is. This is what an inheritance is. So it kinda skips all those things. So as far as the content goes, it follows a case study of an airline. So you you're assumed to be hired at some small airline in the Netherlands, and they have this old legacy system that is full of security holes, full of just bad practices, giant it's basically one giant file.

It's a couple of 1000 lines long with every piece of code imaginable in it. You're hired to bring that into the 21st century. So it basically goes from using c sharp to, I believe, to at the time of writing c sharp, 8 was kinda the latest, and then dot net 5 as well. So we kinda get that transformation as well. So at the end of the book, you have good chunk of code that does represent kind of a vertical slice of an application.

The idea was that all the code in this application used in this book are actually in the book versus, you know, some books will have this giant application in it with thousands of files that you really don't see much of the actual code. There's a lot of magic going on. I didn't wanna do that. So every piece of code in this app, you will see in the actual book as well so that you somewhat hopefully understand what's going on if I did my job. So it's kinda more targeted towards, would you say, like, an intermediate or an advanced audience where someone's already kinda proficient in, like, another programming language and they just wanna learn c sharp, I guess.

So is would that be correct? Yeah. That would absolutely be correct. Intermediate, fun figure. I wanted to call it intermediate c sharp at some point, and then the publisher said, let's not do that.

That is a a horrible title. We're not gonna do that. So but that that really does kind of cover what I intended to do. Because if you are a programmer that knows Java or something like that, then, well, a, going to c sharp is the correct choice. I'm not gonna argue with that one.

But you wanna make that journey as easy as possible. And while they are very similar languages, some respects, they're also somewhat different. So if we can highlight those differences, you know, kinda call this out in the book a little bit and then move forward, that that helps them as well. You work for Acronis. I have some of their applications.

Right. When you go to develop, do you prefer the web, or do you prefer desktop apps? So I'm actually a main back end guy. So Acronis is a very interesting situation because Acronis does not use c sharp. So Acronis is, at this point, mainly a Golang development shop.

They moved from Python a couple years ago. So I get to use a lot of Golang there. And which which is good even for your sharp skills because Go has certain things that sound like they are the same as they are in c sharp, but they're not. So you kinda get to contrast and compare and, like, yeah. No.

I really do prefer c sharp. That it it is better. That it's the safe space. So I imagine it took some work to do the c sharp book on top of focusing on Go in your regular job. Right?

Because like you said, the differences and c sharp is the only object learning language that that I know well. Mhmm. And so I can imagine having to balance 2 at the same time would give me headaches. Yes and no. So Go isn't technically really an object oriented language, so that helps.

Conceptually, it it just operates differently, but I also joined Acronis in the latter stages of writing the book. I was at a company called Workiva before that, and I did mostly c sharp there. So that definitely helped, so I could focus on, you know, really diving into the one language, researching it. Because, you know, even though you may know x amount of things while starting to write a book on a technology or language, you're going to be doing a lot of research into it because you don't know everything. You you can't be expected to know everything.

So yeah. So far surprising that, expected to know everything. So yeah. So far it's surprising that your your publisher, asked you to write a book about c sharp when you you you program in Golang from day to day. Like, how did that happen?

How did the whole thing, like, how did you did you ask them to write a book, or did they approach you? How did how did how did someone if someone wanted to write a book, how would they go about it? So, well, when I started the book, I was doing c sharp day to day, so I'm sure that helped. The way it really came about was I was doing some tech reviews for Manning's books. They have a volunteer program that you can basically enroll in, and you could send every quarter a list of books and projects they have out there, and you can apply to be one of the reviewers.

So I've been doing that for about 2 years on, like, a variety of different things. I think including a c sharp book, there were some dart stuff, DSL stuff. After a while, they they they must have noticed that my comments may have been more valuable on the c sharp book than they had been on the other books because I knew a little bit more about it. So I basically got an email saying, hey, would you consider consider writing a book about c sharp? And I'm like, sure.

Why not? And then we went through the whole proposal stage, which took about 6 months of, you know, I first had the proposal of intermediate c sharp, and my really initial idea was just a survey of the entire c sharp landscape. Everything dotnet in one book is not feasible. You're gonna end up with 20,000 pages. They did not wanna publish that, and I really didn't wanna write that, because I wouldn't be done at this point.

So that kinda morphed itself into what it is now, a book for the intermediate programmer that kinda is the bridge between the resources, that they have. So yeah. So the proposed state, 6 months. Then they said, okay. We're gonna publish this.

Let let's go ahead and do it. You gotta sign an editor and all those cool things, and then you start writing. They hope that you do a chapter about every 2, 3 weeks. Chapters of Manning are about 20 to 30 pages. So so it's a fair bit of writing, but with decent planning, which is what the proposal stage is for.

That should be fine because they ask you to fill in a whole detailed table of contents and, like, what are the learning points a reader may get from this particular section? Or, you know, do you really need this section? So they kind of scrutinize it that way. So you do have a general outline that you can book from. And then, yeah, the writing initial writing took about 6 to 8 months.

And then they start in the meantime, they start doing reviews. So the first third of the book you've written, then they release it to their online early access program where people can already buy it, and they can provide feedback. And in the meantime, they do those volunteer rounds. So this time, I was in the other end of the table, and it does give me some appreciation of, oh, maybe don't be so harsh to, the people that you're reviewing because obviously it it it's different when you're on the other end, and they assign you some ratings and stuff like that, and you iterate on those chapters. And they they do that at every 3rd of the book, so we have 3 big review rounds.

And the publisher judges the feasibility of the book partially based on that. So if if the book is 1 star across the board, obviously, they're gonna pull the block. That that's not going to be something they wanna publish. So it it's in the it's a benefit thing for both the publisher and for the author because your book is going to get better. And let me tell you, they caught a lot of technical mistakes and a lot of really, really, really dumb technical mistakes on my part.

So it it's very good that they went through with that. It's a real it's like it's like a serious pull request. Oh, yes. Alright. This is a code review like you've never seen before.

But, yes, it's, tens of pages sometimes per individual reviewer. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So you mentioned some of the resources in the book.

What do you find are the best resources, for csharp.net? Like, the ones you use to write the book and the ones that you suggest to other people. Mhmm. So, I mean, the really, the big one is just the MCN docs, but they are fantastic. That that really was the core of the research I had to do.

Because, really, anything you need to know, you know, not how to apply it, but everything theoretically that you need to know is there. Now I wouldn't recommend somebody who hasn't ever touched c sharp or even programmed before, you know, hey. Go look at the MSDN docs. Come back in 2 years, and now you're a c sharp wizard. That's not gonna work either.

So an MSDN Docs for somebody who knows somewhat about they're doing. There's a funny thing in the .net world that there are a lot of beginner resources, and it has been a while since I was a beginner, hopefully, depending on what you think of the book. But there are very few really good ones. The the one I used when I started out was I think it was just called c sharp programming. It was an O'Reilly book.

I think my edition was from 2016, and I really liked that, but it was one of those 1,000 page books. It was almost a reference book, but I just kinda read through the entire thing and was able to because I had a job that dealt with c sharp, I could apply immediately. So, obviously, that won't work if you don't have a software job. And then on the other side of that, I really like the c sharp in-depth book. That's a very good book.

So I'll typically point people toward that one after reading my book because that's kind of the the the road Manning wants to make, rather you have the beginner books and then my book, The Intermediate, and then Skeet's book is a Manning book as well. So they wanna have that as the advanced book. So taking 2 years to to write the book, did you find that there were any, like, I guess, changes to to the language and stuff as as you as you went along? And that that made made you have to actually change the content of the book? Oh, yes.

About 1 week before I handed in the final draft, a little thing called the dotnet5beta came out, and I must have not really have been paying too much attention because I was somewhat surprised. But luckily, it's .net, so everything is basically backwards compatible. That being said replace it with the word core, I guess. I have to do it in Google. Right.

Yeah. Well, that was one of them where I just find replace. And luckily, I had some material already in there, you know, oh.net 5 is coming. This is what they wanna do, because it is a bit of a change. But the the code still ran.

But there were some changes that were introduced in .net 5 that we kinda then changed the code for. And mainly that was also some of the reviewers pointed out that, you know, what you have now is totally fine and totally legit, but last week, something else was introduced in the beta. Maybe you should use that now. It's like, well, okay. Well, I couldn't really do it in the meantime, but sure.

Let's do it now. Like, I think the JSON parsing stuff, they they don't really use Newtonsoft anymore, those kind of things. Web host kinda changed. So it was very small things in general. And obviously, you're actually running on dotnet5 was a nice thing.

And from a marketing perspective as well, I think we are one of the first books that are actually on dotnet5, which is a nice coincidence at that point. So, yeah, there were changes, but not nothing like I had to rewrite the entire book. I've heard horror stories of authors where a language version, a minor language version came out and nothing would compile anymore, and they had to completely scratch the entire book. Luckily, I did not have to do that. I would have gone absolutely insane.

So I think I think everybody wants to know how do you get paid. Are you gonna get rich? Is it is it just commission or is it Wait. Wait. I get paid?

That that's that's news to me. I'll put it this way. If you wanna get rich, don't write a technical book. I don't know how many technical books you've seen on the New York Times bestseller list, but I think it's 0. Absolutely 0.

Technical books, it's not like fiction. It's not gonna sell like that. But you don't do it for the money. That that would be a losing battle. Luckily, I knew this upfront because, obviously, I did my research.

But, yeah, I I wish I I would get rich from this. Unless you wanna buy 5,000,000 copies. I can help you with that. So is it is it commission based, or is it just upfront fees or something? It it's a standard book contract where you get you get an advance, which is against future sales.

Right? So you get it in the advance of x amount of money, and then you start paying that out. So that is 10% of your normal book sales typically. So you get that royalty, and then once your advances earned out, then you get the royalty kicks back in, and then you get that. There's some other, like, strange things with foreign sales and, like, O'Reilly, their digital platform works differently.

I I don't really know how differently. It just says in the contract, they work differently. And then you get quarterly statements. So every quarter, I think past 2 quarters that the book is released, then you start getting quarterly payments of whatever is due to you. And they do the the gap there because if a book doesn't sell and it is on the shelf in a bookstore, bookstores will just send it back, and it doesn't count as being sold.

So they kinda have a buffer there that they they wanna see how it operates in the first two quarters, which is really when you're going going to get the most sales for a book like this, and then they can kinda go from there. You might be able to afford a cup of coffees or something like that. Maybe Dunkin' Donuts. I don't know about Starbucks. It's just Dunkin' now.

Just bag. Just Dunkin'. Yeah. I really should know. I live right next to one.

I go all the time. Would you suggest to other developers to write a book? Yes and no. It's going to depend on the person. If you are somebody with a lot of free time and who likes sitting behind a screen and typing, which is going to be most developers, then sure, you you can do it.

Do realize what you're getting yourself into. Like I said before, don't do it for the money. There's no money. Do it for, you know, if you wanna learn more about the language and you have a certain base level of expertise in it and you feel like you can teach it or maybe you have a different angle, yes, absolutely. Go for it.

Explore that option. If you think of it as something that, oh, I'm just gonna write a book, I'll be done in a month. Neither I know there's language inside out. It it's unlikely to happen. Of course, there's exceptions, but it I I believe the standard turnaround for a book is about a year, year and a half at least at Manning, at least, and that's about the 400 page book ranges, which is typically what they're looking for.

They don't wanna publish the the big ones because nobody really wants to read the big ones. Then I had to reel in my inner Stephen King there a little bit and go shorter. I'd be too scared that like because, like, a year and a half, 2 years, like, I do a lot of, like, side projects as well. Most of them don't succeed because just 6 months down the track or even just a few months down the track, I'm just like, you know what? I must be bored of this project.

Like, I'd imagine, like although it sounds like you guys got a contract, but did people ever just give up? Like, do they just, like, write for 6 months and go, actually, no. I'm actually not interested in this at all kind of thing. Yeah. It happens.

So, obviously, the publisher knows this, and they are not dumb, and they have in the contract that if you give up, you're going to have to pay back your advance. So it's going to it's not going to cost you money, but you have to pay back what they already gave you, and you lost all that time. And they also own the rights to everything you've already done so that they could find somebody else to finish it. More often than not, if people run into trouble like that when they kinda wanna give up, which there will be a point regardless of who you are, that you're going to wanna throw the book out the window. There will be that point multiple times.

But there's always the chance or the opportunity for the publisher to put, like, a co author on there or something like that. And if there's legitimate reasons why, you know, you you can't hit a certain deadline, they'll work with you. It it's not like they'll throw you in prison or something if you miss your deadline by a day. They're they're they're very reasonable. You're gonna write another book?

So I've had that question from my publisher and some other publishers now, and my standard answer is not at this time. It takes a lot. And I'm sure at some point, maybe, not right now. I don't have 2 years to spare right now. There there's some other things that I'd probably do before that.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't regret writing the book or anything. I would do it again. But now that I know what it actually involves, I I may hesitate a little bit more to just, on a whim, from an email, take on a project like that. That that would have to be some more consideration into accepting something like that than what I did with this book where it was literally from one second to the next.

Yeah. Sure. Why not? Sounds fun. It's honestly one of those things I'm curious about, but I don't have the time.

I have a 5 year old. Right. But we had Chris Sainte on the show a little while back, and he's doing Manning book on Blazer. Mhmm. And, we were talking about it and he, he said a number of the same things as you, right?

The, the review process is intense, but it makes the the book better in the end. But, he also has a full time job and a blog and a newborn. And I was like, man, how how are you pulling this off? And he's like, you got me. Yeah.

That's impressive. See, I I had to log that. My wife works a work tonight schedule at a time, so I had free time. I just stopped playing as much video games. I stopped reading as much, and I just kinda focused on that.

I'll tell you that I'm very happy that he's writing the Blazer book because in my intermediate c sharp proposal days, I was also going to include Blazer. This was at a time where Blazer was announced but not available, so I knew absolutely nothing about Blazer. I'm like, yeah. Sure. We'll we'll throw that in there.

You know, it should be easy. Blazer came out, and I I tried it, and, you know, it works, but I I am not a front end guy. That is not not something I'm very good at, and even full stack is like, oh, you're getting into danger territory here. So we somewhat decided to, maybe not include Blazer in the this particular book, and then the the book's purpose kind of morphed anyway. But and then the some of the Blazer books were announced, which is nice.

I mean, writing a book on Blazer would be pretty hard because it's a moving target since it's a new framework and Right. None of things have changed. So I'm guessing over 2 years, a lot of it would have changed. So Exactly. Yeah.

And that that's going to be one of those scenarios where, you know, the dot net community decides that they wanna just kill Blazer overnight, wouldn't be overnight. But now you're stuck with, what, 200 pages of a book that nobody's going to buy, that mining is not gonna publish that. Right? Plea please don't kill Blazer. Right.

It's a great idea. But right. My a big part of my job revolves around Blazer now. I I I love the idea of Blazer. I think a bit is Microsoft's attempt to kill JavaScript.

So and that's good. Well, you know, and and, right, it won't ever kill JavaScript because JavaScript Sure. Can't die as a zombie. Right. It's not going anywhere.

But I do like the different approach that Blazor has, And we talked about this previously. Right? One of the benefits of moving to Blazor is you can bring in developers who have a strong c sharp focus, and they don't have to worry about learning Angular or knowing about a JavaScript. Mhmm. Right?

So when it comes to c sharp, because, right, you said you you're a back end guy pretty much all the way. What is your favorite part of the language or favorite piece of code to write for a back end system? Well, those are really 2 separate questions, I guess. Yeah. Yeah.

Sometimes I'm saying, like, do I have a favorite part of a language that I have never been asked that before? Like, I I like I I always like writing my for loops that rely on polymorphism. Like, it it's very basic, but I I that gives me great enjoyment using generics and stuff, those kind of things. I I like doing that. It's not really specific necessarily to c sharp.

Although, the way they do it obviously is it it's its own. So, yeah, I I guess that part of the language. As far as what I like writing best for back end systems, I mean, that kinda changes with what I do day to day because there's really not much I don't like about writing back end systems, unless it's DevOps, which I do not like. Right now, I deal a lot with distributed systems and research into leadership election and those kind of things, which that that's fun. And then seeing how to implement those kind of things.

How how do we do distributed locking and fun stuff like that. That is typically way above my head since I don't have a PhD. My boss also writes, books. He writes books on, the c sharp language. So, he always talks about just how much work it takes.

But luckily, with the language there, he just has to, you know, make updates because he originally has the original version done, and he just has to write updates. Even now, lately, the update's been changing so fast that he's actually skipping a a language version on his books just because, you know, it takes a little while to make the updates and then the new version, and then he's trying to get the book published with the new version, and then they make the new version of the language. And he's like, okay. Hold on. Yeah.

No. You're absolutely right. It they they've sped up. The like, I think we're on c sharp 10 now. Like, that that's a lot of movement in 2 years, basically.

It's almost like we're getting into Java numbers now. Of course, it's it's easier to follow because there's not multiple active at the same time. But yeah. No. I I I can't imagine doing that.

I was a tech reviewer on Bruce Johnson's latest book on Visual Studio, which that was Visual Studio 2019. And I'm glad that they don't put those out every year because I I can only imagine. Luckily, those books aren't massive, but, yeah, I'm sure. I I can't imagine writing a book for every c sharp version. But I assume he does major versions, not every minor versions too.

But Yeah. It's all major Yeah. Major versions. Yeah. Right.

Essential c sharp is the book that he wrote. Oh, gotcha. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

So is is your book geared toward a a certain version that you need to start at for c sharp, or is it just generic? It it's generic. Dot net 5 would be the the starting point. Yeah. I didn't wanna tie it to a specific version number because there really isn't a need to tie it to a specific version number because it's not necessarily a book about c sharp 8 or dotnet5 alone.

It it is a book that deals with concepts that you can apply for c sharp that that are how, you know, idiomatic c sharp works. But idiomatic c sharp doesn't necessarily change, hopefully, all that much from version to version. Like, you may get new functionality like records or the interpolated constants that are coming on now. So stuff like that that may help you with the new things, but the the core remains the same. And, like, the start of the book deals with an older dot net version, so you get to see what dot net and c sharp was in the old days.

And it compared to now, there there is a change, but the core of the language remains the same. I think that's a good idea if you're targeting more intermediate users any, media anyway just because I think, like, a lot of specific you can just look it up when when you actually, I guess, starting the program, but it's just getting those understanding those core concepts, you know, getting them down pat. That's that's really important, really. So Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. And it it to me, it always helps to, like, almost have a curriculum maybe, like, have a bit of a learning path because the Internet is a big place. You can find whatever you want, but if I don't know what to look for, I am never going to find it. So and that's really if you go if you are a c sharp developer, like, with a year of experience and you wanna go really dive into the language and become an expert in it, where do you start? There there's so many topics, and a lot of the advanced resource assume knowledge that are not taught in beginner resources.

So there there's that gap, and hopefully, this book helps a little bit that I can't cover everything, but at least it should give you a little bit more of a platform to go to maybe Jeffrey Richter's books or John Skate's books and those kind of things, or essentially sharp, really. So what are the things you want us to kinda go about? I'm I'm pausing here for a little bit. So what kind of things you else do you wanna cover? I think I mean, the main things were writing the book and what does it look like and those kind of things.

I don't know if this is necessarily like, oh, we need to talk about this or Manning is gonna get angry. There there's no I didn't get any marching orders from that perspective. So, yeah, I don't have anything specific beyond what we already covered. Do you wanna talk about it? Like, if I had a chapter, would would that work?

Or Sure. Yeah. That would work. Yeah. Yeah.

Just me. Do you want me to just launch into it? Do you wanna ask, Chris, how do you wanna do it? About us now. So but just, Caleb, did you wanna?

No. I was gonna say, well well, Sean will restart it in the chat. Yeah. So then we can do your favorite chapter and and ask, you know, if there's anything else. And if there isn't, then we'll go into pics.

Does that sound good, guys? K. Okay. So, talking about your book, what's your favorite chapter? So I have a chapter in mind.

I'm trying to remember if it is chapter 6, 7, or 8 because 8 chapters just blur together at a certain point after 2 years. Chapters have been cut, so the numbers kind of, you know, switch around my mind. But there's a piece, of the book that talks about equality, and I was kinda thinking how can I teach what equality and the code is in a fun yet somewhat maybe obnoxious way? So I went with using a story from it's a folk story from where I'm from. It's Phrygia in the Netherlands.

It it's an area with the Phrygian people, and they have a story about a shibboleth where this war hero would come up to the assailants and basically ask them, butter, butter bread or green cheese. If you can't say that, you're not a real Phrygian, but in in the Frisian language, it's a rhyme, and people who don't speak the language can't say that. So I use that to tie that to testing for equality for Frisian people. So it it's it's a stretch, but the publisher let me get away with it, which is a lot of fun. I was able to put in, like, a little painting of the guy.

So there's that. Not a lot of tech books have that. And in the same chapter, I believe it's the same chapter, there is a little discourse on testing because the the book does deal a fair amount with, test driven development or TDD Lite is what I call it. It's not real test driven development, you know, done all the i's and cross all the t's, but it's more applicable, more application driven. There's I there's a little, like, a Greek Sophocles little dialogue on testing back and forth that I got a kick out of writing, and that didn't cut it.

The the editor liked it, so we're we're good there. It it's always, you know, a little bit dangerous when you fear off the the beaten path there. People don't expect those things in tech books, but, you know, they're they're there. Feel like writing a while reading a tech book, you'd I'd appreciate the or for adding a bit of extra Mhmm. Wackiness, bit of humor in there.

So But I would agree with you. I'll say that not all reviewers agreed with you. But luckily, the publisher did, and I I think it's definitely for the better that it's in there. It is a little bit different. It it kinda breaks up the monotony of a tech book because they can get anonymous regardless how how well they're written, you know, how interesting the topic is.

It's still a nonfiction tech book. It's not the latest thriller that you're not always not wanna read that, so it kinda helps. Here's here's an idea. A fictional tech book. A fictional.

Let's see. I mean, really Let's see. Dumps. And any book written for Python is fictional in my opinion. But Oh.

Yeah. You could you could write the book around a hidden language that if you learn it, you gain control of the universe. Oh. Right? That's good.

Some yeah. Hey. You know? I mean, I've thought about jokingly writing a book about the language of white space. That that would be funny.

It would just be a book full of blank pages, but it would still compile. I love it. That's good. That's good. If you read it backwards, there's a hidden message.

Right. Alright, guys. I think that pretty much covers, what we were gonna go over today. Are you guys ready for picks? I think we are.

Sure. I'm always ready for picks. I love your picks. You guys have awesome picks. Yeah.

Alright. So I I think it's been a while since I've gone first, I think. So I'll go first. And I picked up this little Bluetooth speaker that I could take out to, like, on the park or playing softball or things like that, and it's got really nice sound. It's actually made by Bose, and it's it's not really kinda what I would say a Bose price.

It's actually affordable. It's called the SoundLink Color Bluetooth Speaker 2 And decent sound, it's waterproof, so you can take out don't worry about the rain or anything like that. Hooks up to your phone, laptop, whatever, and, play your tunes wherever you're at. So we're rocking out the, the dugout when we're playing softball, so it's kinda cool. Very nice.

Alright. And it's yours. You get to pick the music. Mhmm. Absolutely.

Well, I'm also the manager of the team, so I get to pick the music. Good. So what do you dictate your players listen to? Mostly eighties. Alright.

Eighties rock and things like that. Top forty, things around that age. Eighties, early nineties, things like that. Yep. Alright.

Why? What's your pick? Yeah. So this week, I just wanted yeah. My pick would just be, just the latest TV show that I've kinda binge watched.

It's called Dead to Me. It stars, Christina Gay. So it's on Netflix. It's kinda like one of those shows where, like, which I don't wanna give too much away because it's kinda like it's kinda like mystery, I guess. But, yes, it's it's about kind of a murder type show.

And every week, it's kinda one of those things where there's, like, a bit of a cliffhanger. So, yeah, it's a pretty fun show. Sure you didn't wanna spoil it for everyone here that listens? Hey. If you did, he'd repeat that to me.

Oh, well, there you go. It's good now. I like it. Alright, Caleb. What's your pick?

So for those of you who don't live in the US, you may not know this or may not care, but the NFL season has started and I am very happy because I like my NFL. And, my pick is actually famous football, which if you haven't drafted, it may be a little late at this point, but it's a fun what's the word? Not detour, but distraction. Right? And and I'm in a couple of leagues with some friends, and we get to talk trash, and it adds an extra little extra spice to the game.

So, yep, that is that is my pick. I watched the, season opener last last night. It was a good game, but I wanted both teams to lose. So Yeah. I I'm not a fan of well, I've never really been a big fan of Tom Brady, but when he came to the Buccaneers and ruined Drew Brees' last season because they beat us in the playoffs.

So, yeah, I I, you know, I have some hard feelings there. This is Australian. I still get I still don't we don't understand how NFL works. It seems like they they play for, like, 30 seconds and then they spend, like, 5 minutes just having a talk about what the next players are playing. See, my gripe is just that you call it football.

It it's not it's not the real true football. There there's only one true sport in the world, and it's football. Yeah. Well, that's well, that's that's why it's American football. Right?

Or or the NFL. Right? If you want to see a fast football game, see if you can pull up one for Ole Miss Football. They're they're my wife's alma mater. They're my favorite college team, and they do our hurry up offense.

So they're doing, like, a series or, you know, every 15 seconds. They're, like, on hyperdrive. So but I find I find soccer or the what the rest of the world calls football to be slow to me. So At least it's over a lot quicker. Why might might have been talking about Australian Rules football?

So that's a little different too. AFL. You know? Yes. Yeah.

I I like that, but that's really because, like, we're up in Australia, and I understand the rules. Otherwise, it might just look like they call it, like, aerial ping pong. Right? They just keep kicking the ball. These guys playing in the mud, it looks like.

Alright. York, what's your pick? Alright. Let's see. So last week, I was kinda looking through my, my Steam backlog.

I was looking for a new video game to play, and I I didn't really wanna commit to something big, so I just kinda clicked through it. And I realized I had never played, The Last Door, So I got that from a Humble Bundle a long, long time ago. I think it's from 2015 or something like that. And so I launched that. I looked up how long it was.

It was a couple of hours, and it's this weird low graphic indie adventure game. I love the, you know, the point and click adventure games. So that was really great. It's kind of like a murder mystery almost conspiracy thing. There's a raven involved.

It's set in England. It it hit all the all the right boxes for me, so I highly enjoyed that. You know, you said Humble Bundle, and you made me think of the good old days because it's dead now. Right. I mean, the stuff they put out is junk these days.

It it's not. 3 or 4 years ago? It was great. I So Although they did just relaunch their, I think it's humongous entertainment box with Butt Butt and Pajama Sam and Spy Fox, and that is my childhood jam right there. So if you ever wanna have children's point and click adventure games, that that that's the one to go for.

And Ben Stiller is actually the voice of one of them, Freddie Fish. So there you go. It's the late nineties. Very good. Very cool.

Alright, Jorg. If our listeners have questions and they wanna reach out to you, how what's the best way to get in touch? Always feel free to add me on LinkedIn. Just Jorg Dronberg. There really is only one.

So that makes it really easy. And otherwise, jorgdronbergdot com. All my info is on there. Shoot me a message through there. Let's connect.

Alright. And that's York with a j? Yes. J o r t, Rodenburg. Yes.

Alright. Cool. And if our listeners want to reach out to the show, we'd love to hear your feedback. Let us know what we can do to improve, and they reach me at Twitter. I am at dotnet superhero.

I wanted to make y'all wait for it. Just a second. I couldn't help myself. And I'm Caleb Wellskodes, but Twitter, Sean, anyway. He's he's more social than I am.

So Alright, guys. Thanks, Jart, for coming on the show. Glad to have you here. Thank you for having me. Yep.

We'll catch everybody else on the next episode of adventures in dot net. Bye, Al. Bye, Al. See you.