I’ve spent the last few week, or so, reading through Azure in Action by Chris Hay and Brian H. Prince. This book is not yet published, so my copy was in the form of a PDF provided by the Manning Early Access Program (http://manning.com/about/meap).
The book is broken into parts, with 2-4 chapters per part:
- Welcome to the cloud
- Understanding the Azure service model
- Running your site with web roles
- Working with blob storage
- Working with structured data
- Doing work with messages
Each chapter is written in the tutorial style, complete with plentiful background information, source code, and diagrams. And, as a testament to the authors' subtle sense of humor that appears throughout the book, there’s even a screenshot of Big Buck Bunny, almost certainly used to satisfy a wager (I’m just guessing, but the conversation probably started over frosty beverages as “I bet you can’t get a picture of a huge rabbit into your book about cloud computing.” and just went from there).
Azure is an internet-based platform, and as such, is not subject to the same long-term release cycles as traditional packaged software. One challenge that the authors have to deal with when writing about a platform that is built for rapid evolution is how to cover a topic without that content becoming stale soon after the book is published. From what I have seen in this book, as well as what I know about Azure futures, they took the approach of covering the baseline topics that will not be subject to change and not make assertions about the future.
For example, the chapters on SQL Azure do not go into the fact that certain data types, like Spatial, are not supported, but instead refer you to the official up-to-date documentation found on MSDN. It’s true that the Spatial data support is not available in the current version of SQL Azure. But, being a highly requested feature, I know that the product team is currently working to implement this, and that we should see Spatial support in SQL Azure around the same time that the book is published at the end of Summer 2010. If they would have stated “Spatial is not supported,” then that statement would have immediately been stale.
I’ve never met Chris Hay, but I know Brian Prince fairly well (count this as that “Full Disclosure” thing that Bloggers are supposed to do), and have seen many of his presentations about Windows Azure. I was fortunate to also be able to help him deliver a few of the Windows Azure Boot Camps around where I live. Brian is a man with a great wealth of knowledge about the Azure platform, and this book is the closest that you can get to having him sit beside you as you embark on your Azure journey.
I have no doubt that when finally released in August, this book will be the most up-to-date resource on Windows Azure development.