

My book 'Programming Windows Azure' from O'Reilly is available - sriramk
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596801971
My night and weekends project for over a year - 'Programming Windows Azure' published by O'Reilly is finally out.<p>When I started off, I've tried to write a book I'd like to read myself. That means a sense of humor (hopefully), lots of code (especially code that doesn't involve the Microsoft stack) and in general, being very deep technical. The code samples are mostly in C# but they are easily translatable to any language/platform you like. I've snuck in a chapter based purely on Python too.<p>I've tried to make this book not as dry as a lot of other technical books. You'll find , among other things, hidden references to Star Trek (TNG and TOS), BSG and atleast one Office-based code sample.<p>I feel a bit bad about plugging my own work on HN but since this essentially took over my life for over a year, I thought it was justified :).
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sriramk
I felt bad about a plug for my book but felt that it was justified given that
it has taken every night/weekend for over a year :)

I've tried to write a book that I would like to read. This means humor (find
all the hidden Trek, BSG references), deep technical under-the-hood stuff and
lots of code.

And in specific, code written in a non-Microsoft stack. All the C# code
samples are easily translatable and there's an entire chapter on crypto stuff
written purely in Python.

Do let me know what you guys think.

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hello_moto
Azure and its companion products look compelling. Unfortunately, I'm a cheap
dude who doesn't want to spend a penny to try new shiny toys. That, and the
marketing stuff in Azure website is a little bit confusing to me at first.

If Azure is free in the future, and if your book is still relevant in terms of
code/API and stuff, I'll buy it first.

I wish you the best sir.

~~~
ryanelkins
If you have a business you can sign up for Microsoft's Bizspark program
(bizspark.com) and you can get access to Azure for free (not to mention all of
MS's other development tools for free as well).

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evo_9
Nice, I hadn't heard about this yet and I'm in a start-up with just 3 people
total that just formed. So yeah, this is looking like it will work for us.
Hopefully vs2010 is a free download, that would save us a nice chunk of our
limited startup dollars. Thanks for posting this.

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jf
evo_9 I didn't see any contact information in your profile. Send me an email
and I'll get you guys into BizSpark.

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vyrotek
Congrats! We're actually using Azure quite a bit with our Startup. We might
have to grab a copy :)

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sriramk
Thanks! Do let me know if you need any help. I do work on the Windows Azure
team and we're always interested in what people are doing with our stuff.

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dragonquest
Serious question, any specific reason you went with O'Reilly and not Microsoft
Press? Seeing as you do work on the Azure team and this would be a perfect
match for MS Press.

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sriramk
I contacted a lot of publishers including MS Press and O'Reilly was the first
to respond. Besides, I really like O'Reilly books and thought it would be
great to be a published O'Reilly writer. They've been amazing to work with.

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eduardoflores
Great, just bought it with the $9.99 discount. The platform is great (as
everything there are some caveats you have to deal with), but it's very
reliable. We are using Azure since July for a custom MapReduce implementation,
using up to 200 instances daily for several hours,
[http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?...](http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000005802)

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kenjackson
Congrats! I plan on doing some WP7 stuff and I'm thinking that Azure seems
like the right place to host the cloud infrastructure. I'll take a look at
this book.

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hop
The cover looks like a manual designed in the MS-DOS era. Something more
modern may do better justice to your content. Lose the italic times new roman,
try Helvetica. Dog/wolf is giant, this isn't a Jack London novel. I'll design
you one if you would like.

Edit: as absconditus pointed out below, it does look like a lot of other
O'Rielly books. Suppose the highly analytical people that read these don't
mind.

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sriramk
Well, I don't have too much control over the cover design - O'Reilly does
that.

I did pick the animal. The animal is a 'dhole' which is popularly called a
'red dog'. 'Red Dog' happens to the original secret code name for the Windows
Azure project.

How that code name came to be is an interesting story in itself and I open
Chapter 1 with that.

