Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches

Not a good buy dur to the fact that Microsoft Azure changes so much. By the time you get the book and read chapter 3 something will have changed, which makes most lessons in the book obsolete, and/or you will have to try and figure out the new way of doing the same thing. This makes this book pointless. Just go online for free resources.

Links and tips are all out dated. You will need to dig into multiple help sections to get through the simplest of examples.

practical, as described

Gives a good overview of Azure to someone new to the platform. You likely won’t be able to migrate your business to the cloud just using this book but it will give you a good lay of the land, explaining where things are and the cloud way of doing things. That might be a little overwhelming to the newcomer and hence the usefulness of the book. Regarding the previous poster...I was able to go through all of the exercises presented in the book as of December last year. There is an option for “classic view” if things default to a different view. Click on that and things should be familiar. Even in the new views you should be able to figure out what to do as the basic structure of Azure seems fairly consistent. It helps to be familiar with the command line and Linux for the exercises. Some of the concepts presented are pretty abstract and the book doesn’t go into too much detail but I don’t fault the book as this is basically an introduction to Azure and meant to be worked through fairly quickly. The author is fairly upbeat and moves through things quickly each chapter has a lab which explains all of the steps clearly.

ConclusionThis book aims to teach you Azure in around 20 hours, and succeeds - with some reservations. It will take maybe twice as long if you follow all the practicals suggested. Even longer if you run into Linux problems.Overall, this book is mostly easy to read, having good explanations and flow between sections, helpful diagrams, and useful website links for further information. A gentle degree of humour is given that assists the reading.The author acknowledges the screenshots and some features may get out of date quickly, owing to the rapid change in Azure’s features. Several of the exercises given in the book gave me problems, searching the internet showed others had problems too. The initial chapters were frustrating for me, I wonder how many people will give up in exasperation?! Which is a pity, because the later chapters are less troublesome. Perhaps Microsoft should provide a stable sandboxed Azure learning area that authors can use to teach others?That said, if you’re persistent (which probably means every developer!), you will cover a lot of ground in this book and be rewarded accordingly. I especially liked the inclusion of a subsection on “Don’t Stop Learning”, with some very useful pointers for further and deeper investigation.Regular readers will be aware this review has considerable overlap with my review of Learning Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches, this is because both AWS and Azure offer similar functionality, and both change rapidly enough to make following the book’s practical exercises very frustrating. I do wonder if this approach is the correct one, I suspect having online learning with the latest screenshots would be more appropriate.So, I’m a bit torn on how to rate this book. If you get problems with the earlier chapters, you might easily give up, hence a rating of 1. If you can get over these problems (or ignore them?), this book offers a great introduction to Azure and deserves a 4.

First, the disclaimers. Microsoft is giving this book away for free electronically. I got two editions of it intended for non-profits, one of which was under the title "Crash Course in Azure." Second, I read the entire book cover to cover because I am moving into Azure at work from an extensive background in AWS. There is no way the book can be read in 45 minutes per chapter over a lunch break as the author claims. I did all of the labs (which was an exercise in frustration), and it always took me at least two hours a day to read a chapter, sometimes up to four if the lab was simply impossible to perform because Azure had changed so much. So the very premise of the book is fatally flawed.Yet the book is very well organized and clearly written. Foulds has picked a good selection of topics and unfolded them logically. A lot of thought went into the labs too. The problem is that at least six of them either cannot be completed at all, or portions of them cannot be finished, because the Azure Portal (and even APIs) has changed so much since the book was written. That's why I am so confused as to why Microsoft is giving his book away for free, because it actually serves as a negative advertisement for Azure, not a positive one.A second edition of the book is forthcoming, and the code is available on GitHub. But no updated instructions for the labs are available, so in many cases the code is available but a reader has no idea what to do with it. And I have proven that even some of the Second edition code no longer works properly. There is an Author's Forum for the book on the Manning Web site, but the author only seems to visit it once a year to provide feedback. Some of the reader's posts were helpful to me, but entire chapters had labs that ended up being useless, and the author simply did not respond to posts for help on his own site.So the book could have been a good advertisement for Azure. Instead it ended up being an exercise in frustration and left a bad taste in the reader's mouth when it came to Azure. I hope the author adopts a very different protocol for his Second edition. He writes clearly and well, and if he actually supported and updated the labs AND THEIR INSTRUCTIONS when the Azure world changed, he would have a good product to offer indeed.

Excellent