HN Books @HNBooksMonth

My night and weekends project for over a year - 'Programming Windows Azure' published by O'Reilly is finally out.

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.

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.

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 :).

⬐ vyrotek

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

⬐ 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.

⬐ 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.

⬐ 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.

⬐ 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?...

⬐ 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.

⬐ borisk

Do you cover Microsoft PinPoint in the book? From what I understand it's supposed to be an AppStore for Azure.

My company has a .NET app, which customers deploy on their own servers. It would be great if we could offer an easy way to buy the app and get it automatically deployed on Azure. On customer's Azure account, of course.

⬐ 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.

⬐ absconditus

It looks just like every other O'Reilly book.

⬐ 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.

⬐ 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.

⬐ 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).

⬐ 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.

⬐ benologist

bizspark is awesome ... took about a week for my little startup to get approved.

⬐ 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.

⬐ None

None

⬐ hello_moto

I have heard about BizSpark program offering by Microsoft, that would only be available for a maximum of 3 years if I'm not mistaken? And you have to be a startup (e.g. have a business or whatnot) right? Not just a regular person/user registering to a website and have instant access to all these goodies.

⬐ ryanelkins

Yes it's available until your business has been around for 3 years or has >$1mm in revenue. You are supposed to be a business although verifying that is done more or less in good faith. You are required to have a URL and an email at that URL. You don't have to be using the MS stack though.

If I remember correctly, there are program directors, you contact one and ask them to sponsor you. They do whatever they feel they need to to verify that you're a business (our sponsor just looked at our website which had some simple info on what we were working on) and then they give you a key that you use to sign up. More info, including the sponsor we used, can be found here : http://www.47hats.com/2008/11/47hats-is-now-a-microsoft-bizs...

⬐ jf

HN readers who want to get their startup into BizSpark can contact me directly to get signed up without hassle.

⬐ None

None

⬐ sriramk

Azure has a local simulation environment that ships with the SDK - you could try that out if you want to play with it. On the cloud, programs like Bizspark get you there at lower cost.

If you have a MSDN subscription, you get a ton of free hours/storage every month - you can run decent sized websites off that

⬐ joubert

Can you run a Linux on Azure?

⬐ sriramk

Nope. Windows VMs only currently. Of course, you could run Cygwin or the like on top if you want to

⬐ jschuur

Don't feel the need to apologize. You wrote a book! A whole book! How many people can claim that? Most people can't even read a whole book, much less write one.

⬐ andywood

Congratulations on finishing your book. I'm curious, how does support for non-.NET/non-Microsoft stack on Azure work? Do you get to install whatever you want in your Azure VM? Is it easy/hard? I've done a couple of small projects in Azure, and didn't realize this was possible.

⬐ sriramk

It works just like on Windows. The rule of thumb is if something can run on Windows (well, in specific Windows Server but that doesn't really matter), it'll run on Windows Azure.

The book has a chapter on how to do this with PHP examples. I recently did a talk on how to do RoR on Azure http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/books_talks.html. Folks have run Python, Erlang, Clojure, etc on Azure without any issues.

The thing to watch out for is that Azure doesn't come installed with these runtimes so you need to package them with your app or install them on the fly inside your VM.

My book 'Programming Windows Azure' just came out today. :) I feel bad about plugging it here but hey, I put heart & soul into it for the last one year so I feel justified :).

Obligatory O'Reilly and Amazon links

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596801984 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596801971

If it helps, I need to point out that my book is chock-full of Star Trek, BSG and Monty Python references and the surprising backstory of how Windows Azure's orginal code name came to be. :)