Book Review: Azure In Action

I was doing a review for "Azure in Action" by Manning.

This book is the perfect guide on your journey into the Cloud.

If you are a .NET developer you should definitely read this book. Cloud computing is becoming a major topic for the future and the Microsoft Azure Platform is the way to go for .NET developers.

Even when you are not going to write a Cloud application in the nearest future, you should have an idea of the principles and concepts that come with the Cloud.

Also some of the concepts of programming for the Cloud and their difference to traditional programming can be very enlightening and can provide you a new perspective, that is also applicable in non-cloud projects.

I can recommend this book also for developers that are not developing for the .NET platform. So far this is the best book I have seen for explaining how programming for the Cloud works and discussing the underlying concepts.
The book shows concrete examples hot to architect and build applications for the Cloud. This is valuable knowhow, even when you build your Cloud applications on another platform than Azure.

The book is written in a light way that makes it an easy and enjoyable read. The style is entertaining with little amusing jests spattered throughout the chapters. Nevertheless the light style is never distracting from the real goal to provide valuable technical content.

As I said before, I think the book is very interesting, because it not only explains the technology/API but also the concepts and principles behind it.
Two examples of this are:

Thorough discussion about the different storage options in the Cloud (Table Service, BLOB storage, SQL Azure, local storage, CDN). The book provides good guidelines when to choose what and shows the implications on the architecture and the design of the system.

The clear differentiation between web-apps (web-roles), storage and background processing (worker-roles, queues) and how to architect scalable applications with this separation.

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