Cloud Computing Books Pick Of The Bunch

Written by Kay Ewbank

Monday, 18 June 2018

Article Index
Cloud Computing Books Pick Of The Bunch
Working in the Cloud
Books on Microsoft Azure

Page 3 of 3

Microsoft Azure SQL Database Step By Step

Authors: Leonard G Lobel and Eric D Boyd
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Pages: 370

ISBN: 978-0735679429

This book is designed to give you an end-to-end walkthrough of SQL Azure, says Kay Ewbank, rating the book at four stars. If you follow the steps, you'll go from creating a simple SQL database on Azure, through to creating a multi-tier cloud solution with a website and Windows Phone app.

The overall conclusion is that the book provides information in a clear and simple way, and you could go from knowing nothing about SQL Azure to being able to make a reasonable attempt to write a database app. You wouldn’t be an expert at the end of the book, but you’d know enough to put a system together and manage it.

Moving Applications to the Cloud on the Microsoft Azure Platform

Author: Eugenio Pace, Dominic Betts, Scott Densmore & Ryan Dunn
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Pages: 176
ISBN: 978-0735649675

This is a very strange book, according to Alex Armstrong, who still gave it four stars. He says that if you just give it a quick flick through then your first impression is that you have just picked up a cartoon book aimed at dummies. If you look more carefully you will notice blue panels that contain C# code and some PowerShell scripts as well. This is what makes it strange - combining two such different levels of presentation.

moving

Overall, Alex says the book is

"surprisingly technical for such a short work. It doesn't succeed in convincing him that Azure is simple or easy to use, but it does it best. At the end of the day, while it is an odd book, if you are looking for an introduction to moving an app to Azure this is a very good choice."

Pro SQL Database for Windows Azure

Authors: Scott Klein and Herve Roggero
Publisher: Apress
Pages: 290
ISBN: 978-1430243953

Writing a good app that uses a database is hard enough; doing the same thing in the cloud adds even more complexity and things to go wrong. Giving this book a rating of 4.5 stars, Kay Ewbank says the book is a good guide to making the move from Microsoft SQL Server to the SQL database that Microsoft makes available on its cloud platform.

Kay's conclusion is that:

"this is a good introduction to the nuts and bolts of using SQL Database for Azure. If you know how to use SQL Server, you will soon be able to get up and running with its cloud-based cousin and have a good understanding of doing it well."

Programming Microsoft’s Clouds: Windows Azure and Office 365

Authors: Thomas Rizzo et al.
Publisher: Wrox
Pages: 600
ISBN: 978-1118076569

This is a book for experienced developers who want to learn about developing for Microsoft cloud - Azure and Office 365. Kay Ewbank was impressed enough to award this book the maximum five stars, saying:

"I liked this book a lot, and felt that it covered the material really well. You could start the book knowing next to nothing about programming the online environments, and by the end you’d know enough to be able to write useful apps."

progcloud

There’s no wasted space on irrelevant padding, and Rizzo and his co-authors do a good job of explaining concepts that some developers will be unfamiliar with. The balance between the different parts is good; the ones on setting up Office 365 and Azure are short compared to the much lengthier details of how to develop apps. There’s a lot of code samples, and it is of course available for download. The examples used in the code are good; short enough to be understandable, but relevant. If you need to learn about programming the Microsoft cloud services, this is definitely a book to read.

Programming Windows Azure

Author: Sriram Krishnan
Publisher: O'Reilly
Pages: 368
ISBN: 978-0596801977

This is well written and wide ranging book on Windows Azure that has a good chance of telling you something you didn't know, but it suffers from covering theory before practice, according to Ian Elliot, who gave it 4.5 stars.

All the examples are in C# and are fairly long. There are lots of screen dumps which just about manage to avoid the criticisms of unnecessary padding but its a close run thing - for a practical programmer some of the text could be cut and tightened up. A better approach would be to get to the practice of Azure earlier and leave the theory till later, or better introduce it as the practical aspects progress. Despite this, Ian says it's a reasonable choice if you want to get started with Azure and are a reasonably good C# programmer who knows ASP .NET.

cloudsq

More Cloud Computing books

If you think we've missed your favourite book on cloud computing, there's a chance we have reviewed it but just not included it in this round up. The complete, and ever increasing, list of our Cloud computing reviews can be found here. However, we do know there are more titles on cloud-based topics out there - and as new editions of them come out we will try to cover them.

Meanwhile if you want to give our reviewers reading recommendations then email Bookwatch.