Author: Tejaswi Redkar
Publisher: Apress, 2010
Pages: 624
ISBN: 978-1430224792
Aimed at: C# programmers
Rating: 3
Pros: Good examples and explanations
Cons: Slow pace and lots of padding
Reviewed by: Alex Armstrong

If you can see your way through the irrelevant stuff and can put up with its waffle then this book will eventually tell you some important things.

A book on the Windows Azure platform can probably assume that its readers program in C# or at least understand it and know something about ASP .NET. What you can't assume is that they know very much about the cloud or Azure in particular.

This book devotes pages and pages to a discussion of other cloud options such as Amazon EC2 which reads more like an intro for managers than something that programmers would find useful and it leads you to expect very little of use later in the book. However, it does eventually settle down to explaining how to use Azure and there are lots of examples and code.

The big problem is that the pace of this book is slow. It has lots of screen dumps that really don't add very much to the explanations. Indeed the text often repeats what is readable in the screen shots.

Despite the slow pace and ample illustrations the overall effect is to complicate what are essentially simple ideas to any ASP .NET programmer. This is a shame because the book does contain examples and explanations that will take you a bit further into the wider facilities provided by Azure.

For example, it covers Blob storage, Queues, table storage, access control, service bus and SQL Azure.

If you can see your way through the irrelevant stuff and can put up with the waffle then you are eventually told some important things.

This is not a good book on Azure because it really doesn't succeed in making anything seem as easy as it really is. There is simply too much talking around the subject.

It does cover all you will probably need to know but it really doesn't tackle anything more than you can find in the documentation.

There are better books on Azure that don't try and pad the material out to create a 620 page book.