Practical Microservices with Dapr and .NET: A developer's guide to building cloud-native applications using the Dapr event-driven runtime

This book provides a very good description of the DAPR .NET SDK and provides examples for all types of configurations from gRPC to KEDA.

I picked up this book because I wanted to understand more about Dapr and see how it could be used in moderately complicated, business scenarios. I really liked that the book used the same Order Service example throughout, and offered a code repository so you didn't have to type all the code yourself. My plan was to read each chapter, then get the code up and running, then tinker around with it to get a better idea of how it works. Sounds easy enough, right?Unfortunately, when I picked this book up in July and August of 2021, I found large portions of the code outdated/incorrect. This was really disappointing because almost half of the book is sample code, but the code in the book is incomplete. I suspect the files in the repo have changed since the book was first published. By chapter 3, I came across scenarios that were in the book, but not in the repo. By chapter 5, getting the code to run required doing a bit of research on your own to fill in the steps left out by the book.I ran into an assortment of errors, such as:- Some code comments are wrong- Couldn't get program working (Chapter 6)- PowerShell script has errors (Chapter 6's launch.shipping.ps1)- Supplied POST messages cause errors (Chapter 7's order.test.http)- Names of scripts in the book are not in repoBut most importantly, chapter 8 is where everything comes together with a Kubernetes deployment. I went through that chapter three times, and I could never get the program to work as described. That was really disappointing. There's a chance that most of these could be my fault, but I'd guess otherwise. In my 20-year software development career, I've never had so much trouble with a book. I plan to avoid Packt books in the future.On the plus side, the book's appendix includes several short essays worth reading. I especially appreciated the overview of Microservice architectural principles.If the publisher and author care to hear it, here's my advice: Update the book to match the latest repo. Give step-by-step instructions for how to run the programs for each chapter.

Enjoy reading this book

A well-designed book. The author has well explained how to use the book and he shares all the source code through to GitHub. You will have a good understanding of what you should expect from the book at the beginning.The book teaches different ways of using Dapr. Everything has explaining step by step and provided all useful links and resources. All codes are well explained, there are enough screenshots to be able to follow up the steps, and related parts are highlighted within them. The topics are provided by diagrams. A good reference to learn Dapr technology.

Very informative and fantastic book - well written, practical examples, great depths into explaining certain concepts along with the implementations. One thing that stands out is how the author starts by stating what DAPR is and what will be covered in the following section. Great detail to writing. Davide goes into great detail explaining the implementation of microservices using DAPR and .NET, exactly what the title states with the term “practical”. This was super useful information especially when you want to learn microservices using .NET with DAPR.

I thought the code samples provided were quite good. However, I found the description of the overall concepts in each chapter could use much more explanation. When should each of the tools be used? When should they not? The chapter on actors in particular could have used a more thorough explanation. The chapters had many instructions to set up the code. I felt like steps were left out or not explained well. I found myself skipping most of the instructions and just trying to figure things out on my own from the sample code.

Excellent book for learning dapr for adapting microservices , 10 chapters are nicely elaborated in easy to understand SOA sections with k8s , pub sub, actors , also including scaling , load testing and tracing

The Microservices domain benefitted massively from Spring Framework, Spring Boot, and Netflix OSS early on. The Java ecosystem made rich contributions to Microservices. However, Polyglot remains a critical goal of the Microservice movement, and each team should be able to choose their languages and frameworks as long as they talk HTTP/REST. From that standpoint, the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) emergence from Microsoft plus its open-source nature is a very welcome change. The .NET Core stack maturity, regular release of versions like 5, and 6 and the emergence of framework support enriches the stack for Microservices development.The author has done an excellent job introducing the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) in this book and done so within 275 pages! While it has covered general topics such as API development, invoking APIs as a client, it is great to see an Actor framework (like Akka in the Java Ecosystem) coming up in the .NET ecosystem. While Dapr can be deployed standalone and in Kubernetes, I expect the latter to be a dominant force and chapter 8 on Kubernetes' deployment of Dapr is an asset!Overall excellent buy and can be completed in two weekends book and highly recommended. However, after completing this book, spend serious time covering solid nonfunctional requirements like security, monitoring, scalability and error handling, logging for both standalone and in Kubernetes before you consider Dapr for high traffic production applications. For other applications can use right away for having a feel.