Congratulations on still being here! The knowledge you’ve acquired to this point gives you the right and privilege to access the most complex, but also the most rewarding, part of this book.
This part follows a modular approach. Each chapter provides a comprehensive overview of a specific topic that you may want to implement in our web API, depending on the scenario and your (or your product owner’s) specific needs.
Chapter 7 introduces the concept of application logging, from its historical roots to the exponential growth of its importance gained within past few years. It also explains the differences between structured and unstructured logging and shows how to implement structured logging in ASP.NET Core by using the built-in ILogger interface or a third-party logging framework such as Serilog.
In chapter 8, we’ll learn how to cache data on the server, on the client, and/or at an intermediate level by using a set of techniques available in ASP.NET Core, such as HTTP response caching, in-memory caching, and distributed caching (using SQL Server or Redis). These features, used correctly, can dramatically improve the performance of a web API, as well as greatly reduce the load on the server.