Exam Ref AZ-304 Microsoft Azure Architect Design Certification and Beyond: Design secure and reliable solutions for the real world in Microsoft Azure

Short Version: I can recommend this book for the Azure Architecture exams, even as Microsoft adjusts the content ever so often, as it does a great job covering the essential material and concepts.Long Version: I’ve been taking Microsoft Exams for just shy of 20 years now, and have successfully passed dozens of them (including this one!) outside of other industry exams. My “Gold Standard” for exam prep books are still the Microsoft Press “Blue Books” of 20 years ago, which were written in a very dense, dry, explicit fashion that didn’t necessarily give you a crib sheet for the exam (there was a handy CD-ROM included for that!), but rather taught you all of the elements that you would need to know to master the subject at hand and do the work in your daily job.Times have changed – for one, the exam itself is now cramming in a breadth of materials that would formally have been half a dozen individual exams. Partly that’s to reflect the breadth of knowledge an architect would need to have these days, and partly because the technology has advanced to such a degree in the Cloud that a lot of the minutiae of service setup and drive partition alignment is no longer necessary. For another, MS Press is no longer cranking out those detailed books, and so we’re left searching for alternatives.This book captures the essence of what I liked about the Microsoft Blue Books of yore – that it’s teaching you the elements you would need to know to actually do this work in the field rather than being a simple exam crib sheet. It is written in a more colloquial, easy to read format, and breaks up the material into chapters roughly how Microsoft breaks up the exam “skills covered.”Inside the book is a good mix of conceptual approaches, diagrams, step-by-step instructions, and screen shots of the Azure Portal that’s large enough to see what’s going on. Helpful links, like the ever-changing list of Azure IP’s by service, are included, and concepts such as FIPS 140-2 are given a nod. There’s a section that provides something of a history of infrastructure architecture, and what its implications are for the current mode of ci/cd and infrastructure-as-code JSON templates. Code, where provided, is broken out into easy to read examples that again provide the best of the approach to learning this type of material – do it yourself to practice. There are some good Q&A study prep questions, but nothing to the extent of like an online practice exam or similar.I don’t have much to criticize about this book that doesn’t stem from the Microsoft exam itself – that the exam is covering a wide swath of material that would be better served as a few exams that go more in-depth into the topics themselves. For example - databases, both SQL and NoSQL, are covered in the book to the extent that they’re covered in the exam – but each of those topics are probably worthy of their own exam (the DP-300 arguably covers the former), and even within the broad topic of NoSQL there’s a number of high-level flavors – DocumentDB, Key-Value, Graph, and so on – that don’t get treatment in the exam, and therefore don’t get full treatment in the book. Again, no fault of the book, but of the exam.In sum, if I were an IT Admin looking to move up to a more architect role, or just looking to be familiar with the latest Cloud technologies, I would recommend this book to help you get there, and by extension to pass the exam.

Note: I received a free eBook in exchange for an unbiased review.The Exam Ref AZ-304 Microsoft Azure Architect Design Certification and Beyond is a book that is useful for designing solid Azure systems. It takes into consideration all aspects of enterprise design, such Identity, Governance, High Availability, Monitoring and Operations.Each of those are treated in depth. The book finishes up with a Mock Exam (with answers).While the book certainly helps with the AZ-304 exam, the chapters do not exactly correspond to the topics of the exam.So, except for that minor quibble, this book is a great reference for designing enterprise grade systems in Azure.

I really like this book, which is a single source of all the information you need to pass Az-304 exam. All the information is arranged in systematically , it helps to understand each topic better conceptually .

This book is a good reference book if you plan on taking AZ-304 exam .like some one else mentioned it also has a mock exam with answers. over all a good reference book. I would also recommend az-304 github page

This book is good for people who are preparing for the AZ-304 exam. It’s like a reference guide for people, I’ve also gone through his previous book on AZ-303 and that was great 😊 however, the length of the book could be less.