The Book

I do believe I’ll be ordering an ebook edition of Apress’ Windows Azure Platform. Here’s Apress’ description of the book:

Master Microsoft’s brand-new cloud-computing technology with Windows Azure Platform by Tejaswi Redkar. You’ll learn how to utilize Azure’s four core components— Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services—both separately and together to build flawless cloud computing services.

What you’ll learn in Windows Azure Platform:

• Everything you need to know about the Azure Services components—from Access Control to SQL Services, from the Service Bus to Workflow Services.
• Understand both the architectural thinking behind Azure and the nuts-and-bolts code that binds your service together.
• Design, build, and deploy an Azure service with the assistance of a fully worked template for end-to-end application design that mimics a real-world scenario and gives you a rock-solid example of the design and development processes that you need to work through.

The Discounts

If you bought the ebook version of their previous Azure book, Introducing Windows Azure, you’ll get an automatic 50% discount off the the price of the ebook of Windows Azure Platform.

If you didn’t buy the ebook version of Introducing Windows Azure, you can still get a discount. If you place an order for Windows Azure Platform before the end of December 31st, use the discount code APRESSHOLIDAYML, which will apply a 25% discount to your entire purchase (so you can save on other Apress books, too!)

These discounts won’t last very long, so place an order today!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Manning Publications have a great variety of books on .NET development. There’s the stuff you’d expect, such as books on C#, ASP.NET and SharePoint, but they’ve also produced books on IronPython and IronRuby (not many books on these languages), functional programming is both F# and C# and doing brownfield development and building DSLs using .NET. Many of their books have helped me get up to speed with .NET development, and I’m currently working my way through The Art of Unit Testing.

Another great thing about Manning Books is that they’re available in both paper and electronic form. This is great news for me, as I have disk space aplenty, but I’m running short on shelf space. There’s also the fact that while technology-specific books are useful, their shelf life is rather short. I’ll still buy paper editions of books that are longer on theory and technique, but when it comes to specific versions of languages, libraries or frameworks, I’ll take the ebook version.

One more great thing about Manning Books is that they’re generous with the discount codes. Their discount codes are often for 33% to 50% off the regular price, and they announce them on their Twitter account, @ManningBooks. If you’re looking to build your tech library and save money at the same time, you should follow them.

(Just so you know: Neither I nor anyone at the Developer and Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft have any kind of arrangement to promote Manning’s books. I just like their books, and getting a discounts on them is a bonus.)