RavenDB 4: Getting Started course is live!

Kamran Ayub -

It's here! Go and watch my new Pluralsight course now to learn about working with RavenDB 4! RavenDB is available for free, even for production use.

What you'll learn

You can watch the course overview for free, if you prefer.

Otherwise, from the course page:

RavenDB is a cross-platform NoSQL distributed document database designed for small to enterprise-level applications. In this course, RavenDB 4: Getting Started, you’ll learn how to leverage RavenDB in the context of .NET application development. First, you’ll learn what RavenDB brings to the table and what problems it will help solve. Next, you’ll see how to create, update, and query data with the .NET client SDK. Finally, you’ll discover how to manage Raven using the first-class "Studio" UI experience. When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have a foundational knowledge of Raven enabling you to use it in your next NoSQL-based application.

The course is organized around a sample application (that is publicly available) written in ASP.NET Core and C#. It's pretty simple, on purpose, to showcase the major features of Raven.

Creation process

This course is only around 2 hours compard to my TypeScript course which is a full 8 hours long but this time I decided to track my time more closely. The breakdown was roughly:

  • Content (slides, research, etc.): 33 hours
  • Planning (proposal, assessments, course wrap-up): 5 hours (?)
  • Recording: 13 hours
  • Code: 24 hours
  • Editing: 30 hours

To be fair, the last 3-4 weeks I did not end up tracking time so I estimated that based on previous hours, I spent around 100 hours of work. I started the course in mid-October so it was about 4 months of work. In that time, we had a two week trip in Hawaii and we also closed on a new house (in addition to normal fatherly duties for my then 10 month old)--hence I finished a month later than I had initially planned. The funny thing is, RavenDB 4 went stable the same day the course went live! So the timing worked out great.

As far as my workflow--I wrote all the code first for the course to fully understand what to teach and what would need to be covered. Then, I went one module at a time, working on content first then any code demos and then recording/editing. Even with all the code written, I still ended up moving some content around to make the flow more natural and introduce concepts in the right order.

What's next?

I plan to write a series of posts on Raven, maybe even do a few livestreams. Since I focused on the .NET SDK in the course I'd love to write a sample in Node, Go, and Python as well (these could be the subject of the livestreams). The course will be added to the official RavenDB site as a resource.

As far as Pluralsight goes--I won't be starting a course immediately since I need to get the new house (and office!) in order and get ready for my April workshop on Node.js Bots in Azure and May session on TypeScript/React at NDC. I also need to propose the course and get it accepted! I would love a follow-up course to dive deeper into building with Raven as this course really only scratches the surface.