Microsoft Azure Enterprise Application Development Book Review

The book is a nice concise overview of Microsoft Azure. I have not had any clients express interested in the cloud yet. They are not willing to hear about giving up the control over their environments which is a stigma the cloud conversation carries with it. I still wanted to know what is going on with Azure, without having to spend 2 months mulling through a tome. This book was the perfect size and depth for getting me up to speed quickly. The book is intended to give you enough information to decide whether or not further movement toward the cloud is something you want to do, and it does that perfectly. The book starts off with an overview of cloud computing, an introduction to Azure, and covers setting up a development environment. After that the rest of the book designs and builds a sample application which is used to introduce the key components of Microsoft Azure. The book has a chapter on each of the following topics- Azure Blob Storage, Azure Table Storage, Queue Storage, Web Role, Web Services and Azure, Worker Roles, Local Application for Updates, Azure AppFabric, Azure Monitoring and Diagnostics, and Deploying to Windows Azure. Most chapters introduces the topic and then show a working example. The others that just describe the topic describe it in enough detail that you have a good understanding of the topic and they provide good references if you want to dig deeper. The book did a really good job covering the different types of services and different types of storage available. It also did a great job of describing the differences in SQL Server and SQL Azure. All in all I thought this book did exactly what it set out to do. It provided me with enough information that I now feel like I know what Microsoft Azure is all about. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants an introduction the Microsoft Azure platform. You can get more details, check out the table of contents, and read a sample chapter from here.