Late last year the nice people at Packt asked if I would mind writing a review of Azure for Developers in exchange for a free copy of the book. They were happy when I made it clear that I don’t do marketing, but I would happily write an honest review after reading.
Whilst I received a digital copy, I bet the physical edition of this is a weighty tome. It’s author, Kamil Mrzygłód, aims high for the book’s purpose which is to take developers through a range of Azure services, explain how they can form part of an application architecture, when to chose one over another, and provide working code samples to boot.
Cards on the table - I don’t consider myself a developer. I can read code, but I can’t write it well. Most of my time is spent with infrastructure-as-code and PowerShell. However, I’ve seen plenty of books that show the ‘happy path’ and ignore topics like security or deployment with CI/CD. This isn’t that kind of book.
If I had one grumble it would be that the command line examples are almost entirely Azure CLI. However, in fairness Kamil has an entire chapter on choosing between the two, and page counts are limited enough that having samples for both is impractical.
Structurally, the book is an epic journey that begins with choosing your developer tools and accessing Azure for the first time, travels through creation of applications and choosing hosting like App Services, then onto configuration and secret management and beyond. There are excellent sections on containers and the hosting options in Azure, messaging services, databases, telemetry and monitoring, and then AI services and DevOps.
Some chapters feel like they have more room to breathe than others, but where space is short there are plenty of external references to help the reader learn more. I really appreciate authors who do that - technology books struggle with the pace of change in our industry, but here the discourse is on core skills and understanding, with pointers to official docs to ensure currency.
This is a solid and dependable book for developers who are new to Azure (perhaps cloud in general; perhaps coming from another cloud). It will help that audience learn about what Azure services offer and which to use where, along with good practice for connecting to and managing the Azure tenant, subscriptions and services.
This isn’t a deep dive on any given area of service and nor does it ever present itself as such. However, it’s not a flimsy high-level book either. The experience of the author shows in every chapter and the reader will come away with a good understanding of what they need to learn in order to do aAzure development well.
I feel comfortable in recommending this for people involved in Azure software projects. I think it has more value to developers and architects then the platform and operations side of the house, but that’s not to say it’s just for developers. I would say that non-coders would get less value, though.
Importantly, this isn’t some short-lived, left behind by the tech tomorrow kind of book. The simple fact that this is the third edition really underlines that fact. It’s the kind of book that you can and will refer back to, and can comfortably recommend to a friend a year from now safe in the knowledge that it will still have value.
You can find the book on the Packt website or in a bookshop of your choice.