Book Review: Azure for Developers, Third Edition by Kamil Mrzygłód
The definitive guide to creating secure, scalable Azure apps with GenAI, serverless, and DevOps pipelines
Happy New Year, friends! Thanks for following along, engaging with my posts and enriching the community. This year, we’re locking in even more on Azure!
Before the holidays, I got a review copy of this book, and thanks to a few quiet days over the break, I finally had time to read it.
Azure is an exciting place to build right now. It is also an overwhelming one. New services, new patterns, new opinions. Most of us have felt that tension between moving fast and actually understanding what we are building.
This book meets you right in that space. What stands out immediately is the focus on fundamentals. Every chapter slows down just enough to explain the basics before going deeper.
The journey begins where it should. Explaining Azure CLI, PowerShell, and end-end environment setup, so you can get hands on without friction.
The new AI content is especially well done. The Azure OpenAI and Azure Machine Learning chapters do not jump straight into code. Kamil explains what OpenAI is, what Azure OpenAI is, how deployments work, what tokens really mean, and why prompts behave the way they do.
That same pattern shows up across the book. Storage. Messaging. Workflows. Containers. Each chapter resets context, explains the core ideas, then builds on them. This makes it easier to reason about trade offs instead of memorizing services. Monitoring and observability also get the attention they deserve. Application Insights is covered properly, including dependency tracking, environment separation, and practical configuration. This is an area many teams underinvest in, and the book does not gloss over it.
The book has twenty solid chapters, organized into five key parts:
Setting Up Your Environment
Web Applications and Workflows in Microsoft Azure
Containers in Microsoft Azure
Storage, Messaging, and Monitoring
AI, ML, and DevOps
You will find useful screenshots, code snippets and diagrams that provide clarity.
I can say confidently that this book is a solid choice for developers, backend engineers, DevOps-minded developers, and architects who want a practical, developer-focused view of Azure services.
Book link here: Azure for Developers: The definitive guide to creating secure, scalable Azure apps with GenAI, serverless, and DevOps pipelines
Let me know if you would be reading it.
That’s all for today. See you in the next one.