Learning Windows Azure Mobile Services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8

A few weeks ago I was approached and asked if I would like to review a book on Windows Azure Mobile Services. While I've worked with Azure from its inception, this is not an aspect of the platform that I have utilized, so I accepted - figuring I would have the opportunity to learn about a new (to me) aspect of a service I was already quite familiar with. I was provided with a copy of Learning Windows Azure Mobile Services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 (name is way too long) by Geoff Webber-Cross and set out reading.As I stated, I am not a professional mobile developer so I won't be criticizing Geoff for failing to properly discuss X or the need for Y feature. Instead, I would simply offer that I found the book quite an easy read that provided a good overview of the tools provided in the Azure toolbox supporting mobile developers. Along the way, I refined some ideas for a few mobile apps I've been dreaming about writing (well, maybe someday). What I really appreciated is that the book takes you step-by-step through a reasonable example and helps you (even as a new-to-mobile dev) understand the parts and pieces for getting your solution working within the Azure cloud.If I had to complain about anything it would be that while he did a good job explaining how to use the platform tools, he didn't always explain why you would want to (i.e. why the mobile services were better than hosting data feeds from your own site, etc.). In many cases, the answers to such questions should be self-evident to the informed reader, but for the most part, this is a hands-on book and not theory laden (this should be no surprise based on the book's tagline).

I received this book from the publisher with an ask for review.As the title suggest the book is completely concentrated on the Microsoft/Windows ecosystem. It does explain how to do things if you want to use Windows Azure Mobile Services for your mobile application but it gives little about why you should do it this way, what are the best practices and what are the alternatives. In addition the example application is really hard to follow and throughout the book I wasn't sure what it is supposed to do - hence following the code is also problematic. The book should be usable without the need to download the code and run it.In general I do not think that the book adds value over the free documentation available on Windows Azure web site.My suggestions to the author are to:- pick an example application that readers can relate to and describe it as a scenario at the beginning of the book- develop the flow of the book based on the application scenario and explain what parts of the back end is used in each step of the scenario- use screenshots of the example application throughout the book so readers can see the end product of using the services- describe alternative approaches (if available) for implementing particular step of the scenario- describe why he chose to take this path of implementation, what are the benefits and drawbacks