Azure Storage, Streaming, and Batch Analytics: A guide for data engineers

I just completed the book. It's a great intro to data engineering, especially if you have experience with .NET or other Microsoft technologies. The author gives many examples and diagrams to help the reader understand complex material. There is also a hands-on activity that you can do on the online Azure platform. The activity builds with each chapter, and by the end you have completed an actual project. It's a great way to test whether you're really understanding the concepts, and it reinforces your learning as well.I highly recommend this book to Microsoft technologists interested in data engineering or anyone who is drawn to Azure over AWS and Google Cloud.

The good: this was the first Azure data engineering book I read and I learned a lot from it. Mr. Nuckolls does a great job discussing the key concepts that new data engineers should be aware of. He demonstrates how to set up each Azure service using both the user interface and PowerShell.The not so good: Microsoft has deprecated Azure Data Lake Analytics and shifted its resources to Synapse Analytics. The three chapters on Azure Data Lake Analytics and U-SQL are completely obsolete.Unfortunately, this book doesn't cover Spark/Databricks or Synapse Analytics, which are the predominant Azure data engineering technologies today. Most of the chapters in this book are still useful; however, I recommend reading "Cloud Scale Analytics with Azure Data Services" by Patrik Borosch for more up-to-date material.

I've had the pleasure to work closely with Richard as our careers intersected, and this book is exemplary of the excellence he brings to all of his work. As a .NET engineer myself, but not a data science guru, this book was an accelerator for my introduction to analytics using Azure. The patterns and practices Richard describes present a concise, clear approach which even Microsoft themselves have come to adopt in their own guidance. This is a great resource and I highly recommend to anyone working with data science in Azure.