First book - VMware NSX Cookbook

I haven't been blogging lately because I was writing a book on VMware NSX. It all started in early February 2017 when someone from Packt Acquisition Editor reached out to me and informed me that they were looking for someone who can author a cookbook on NSX. I wasn't sure as I haven't authored a book and English is not my first language so I don't think I would be the best person at that time.

After reading up on Packt cookbook format; apparently, a cookbook is focused more on 'How to do it' and 'How it works'. Reading few cookbook examples, I can see that most of the cookbooks are not heavy on the theory. I would just need a small intro section and then the focus would shift to 'How to do it'. I've been designing and deploying NSX for the past few years so I think I should be able to take this opportunity to contribute more to the community through authoring a book.

But still I wasn't too sure if I should take this opportunity, so I reached out to Iwan Rahabok to gather further insights about authoring a book as he has authored multiple books with Packt. He mentioned that writing a book is damn painful and luckily he wrote few tips for the first-time author here: http://virtual-red-dot.info/tips-first-time-book-author/. I still think that I could do with more help, to ensure I write a good quality cookbook and Packt is open to the idea of co-authors. I asked around in the VMware NSX communities and thanks to Dale Coghlan, he introduced me to one of his colleague in the VMware NSBU - Tony Sangha who is keen to author a book on NSX and my first impression was that we would be a great team!

After teaming up with Tony, the next step is for us to create an outline for all chapters, what would be covered in each of the chapters, how many recipes, how many pages and when we can deliver each of the chapters which are not easy as we don't know how many pages it would be after writing and this is our first time authoring a book! Once all the final outline had been agreed with the publisher, we then needed to sign the contract and start the chapter writing - we started to write our first chapters in April 2017.

After many sleepless nights, we were finally able to jointly release the book and become published authors in late March 2018. Thanks to everyone involved, huge thanks to Dmitri Kalintsev for the technical review and Sjors Robroek for the foreword. The book is now available on Packt and Amazon as per the following li

• https://www.packtpub.com/virtualization-and-cloud/vmware-nsx-cookbook
• https://www.amazon.com/VMware-NSX-Cookbook-Virtualization-fingertips/dp/1782174257

If you are interested to review the book, I might be able to get an eBook copy from the publisher. Feel free to reach me on twitter/email for more information or for any feedback you have!