My New Azure Book

Last week Microsoft Press released the latest update to my book, Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamentals of Azure, Second Edition.   As the name indicates, this is an update to Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamental of Azure released in February 2015. I worked on both editions with my friend Robin Shahan.

The first edition of the book was relatively popular, with over 200,000 copies either downloaded or distributed in print. Thank you for the amazing support! I’m very happy so many people found the book to be helpful.

When the Microsoft Press editor that worked on the first book initially approached me about working on an update, I was honestly a bit hesitant. Writing a technical book is a lot of work . . . especially a book on a platform such as Azure that seems to be constantly evolving. However, after many discussions with Robin, and my wife (getting spousal approval was very important as this effort would require many nights and weekends away from my family, which added a new baby to the party earlier this year), I decided to write the update. Thankfully Robin agreed to join in on the fun too. She’s a lot of fun to work with!

My thinking going into this process was there would be a few significant updates, but mostly it would be changing a few screenshots, updating a product name or two (i.e. Azure Web Sites became Azure Web Apps), and maybe including a bit of content around new services like Azure Service Fabric. It wouldn’t be that much work. Wrong!

Azure is a fast-moving platform. In the nearly 13 months since the first edition of the book was released to when I got started on the second edition, many things had changed. The second edition contains quite a few significant updates. The sections on Azure Web Apps, Azure Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, Storage, and management tooling all received major edits. Key concepts such as Azure Resource Manager, use of the (new) Azure Portal, and the (almost entire) removal of Azure Cloud Services also received increased focused in the second edition. We also added a new chapter on Additional Azure Services which provides a brief introduction to several other Azure services Robin and I felt were important to understand. There are so many valuable services in the Azure platform, but we couldn’t discuss all of them in the book (or else we still might be working on the book, and it would be huge). These are services we personally felt were of significance for the broad majority of people. (Robin adds more info on the changes in her comment here.)

I would be remiss if I didn’t once again thank the Azure experts that volunteered their precious time to help review the book. Many of these people helped on the first edition too. Their expertise and honest feedback was critical in writing this book. Thank you!

• Neil Mackenzie
• Jennelle Crothers
• Mike Wood (Azure MVP)
• Mike Martin (Azure MVP)
• Byron Tardif, Ashwin Kamath, and Rajesh Ramabathiran from the Azure App Service team

I hope you find the second edition of the book to be a valuable asset to your journey to the public cloud with Microsoft Azure!