It’s generally difficult to find a good book on cloud and Microsoft Azure related material to help learn from. This can be extremely frustrating when you’re new to a technology and are looking for a concise source to get up to speed, and good books are the perfect solution to this. After some deliberation, I’ve decided to start a new project for Build Azure. The new project is the Build Azure Book Catalog, and it’s located at http://books.buildazure.com

Not just is this somewhat of a curated list of books, but it supports extremely easy filtering and searching. This will greatly assist you in finding a book on a certain technology much easier. It also includes the display of whether the book is Free or Paid, as well as the Year it was published.

The catalog UI is built to be responsive and works great on both Desktop and Mobile devices!

The searching and filtering supported is currently implemented on the following fields / data:

Year Published – This lets you filter for more recent or older books from a specific year.
Price – This let’s you easily filter out either Free or Paid book form the list if desired.
Text Search – The Free-Text search allows you to search the books Title, Description, and Authors for a particular word, phrase or technology you’re looking for.

This can help filter out the relavent content you’re looking for!

Currently the Build Azure Books Catalog only has a relatively short number of books. I am working to find great Azure and cloud related books to add to the list. If you have a book in mind that would be great to add to the list, please submit it as an “issue” in the Github repo for the catalog. Right now there are 31 books in the list (at the time of writing this post) but that number will certainly grow in the coming future.

Book sales may be slowly dropping due to the increased use of StackOverflow, blogs, better documentation sites, training videos, and other online resources, however, books still remain as one of the absolute best learning and reference resources available. The contain concise information on a certain technology topic that has been verified for accuracy and is easy to look up when needed in the reliable source that it is.

Long live technical books, and hopefully the Build Azure Book Catalog helps you find a book to learn that next hot technology!

About the Author

Chris Pietschmann

Chris Pietschmann is a Microsoft MVP, HashiCorp Ambassador, and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) with 20+ years of experience designing and building Cloud & Enterprise systems. He has worked with companies of all sizes from startups to large enterprises. He has a passion for technology and sharing what he learns with others to help enable them to learn faster and be more productive.