Microsoft is giving away truckloads of ebooks
Microsoft is doing it again; the company is giving away (for free) an entire collection of ebooks covering major Microsoft products such as Windows, Windows Server, Microsoft Office, Exchange Server, and a lot more.
All that it takes is to visit the official giveaway page hosted on Eric Ligman's blog on MSDN, and start downloading any ebooks that you are interested in. (Eric Ligman is Mcirosoft's Directory of Sales Excellence).
Downloads are not limited, and anyone may download one, some or even all of the books listed on the website.
Most ebooks are offed in multiple formats. The most common format is PDF, but you will find ebooks offered as DOC, MOBI or EPUB versions as well.
Microsoft free ebook giveaway
Here are the different categories that ebooks are available in, and some example books that you may download.
- Azure
- Introducing Windows Azure for IT Professionals
- Microsoft Azure Essentials Azure Machine Learning
- Microsoft Azure Essentials Fundamentals of Azure
- BizZalk
- BizTalk Server 2016 Licensing Datasheet
- Cloud
- Enterprise Cloud Strategy
- Developer
- Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure: Best practices for DevOps, data storage, high availability, and more
- Creating Mobile Apps with Xamarin.Forms: Cross-platform C# programming for iOS, Android, and Windows
- Dynamics
- Introducing Microsoft Social Engagement
- Create Your First CRM Marketing Campaign
- General
- Licensing
- Office
- Data Resiliency in Microsoft Office 365
- Keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Outlook 2013 and 2016
- Microsoft Excel 2016 Quick Start Guide
- Power BI
- Introducing Microsoft Power BI
- PowerShell
- Windows PowerShell 3.0 Language Quick Reference
- Windows PowerShell 3.0 Examples
- Windows PowerShell 4.0 Language Reference Examples
- Simplify Group Policy administration with Windows PowerShell
- WMI in Windows PowerShell 4.0
- SharePoint
- SharePoint Server 2016 Quick Start Guide
- RAP as a Service for SharePoint Server
- Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016 Architectural Models
- SQL Server
- Data Science with Microsoft SQL Server 2016
- Backup and Restore of SQL Server Databases
- Microsoft SQL Server 2016 New Innovations
- Surface
- System Center
- Guide to Microsoft System Center Management Pack for SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services (Native Mode)
- Virtualization
- Windows Client
- Introducing Windows 10 for IT Professionals
- Windows 10 IT Pro Essentials Top 10 Tools
- Windows Server
- Introducing Windows Server 2016
Most ebooks are designed for system administrators and developers. This should not come as a surprise, as the ebook collection is made available on the Microsoft Developer Network site.
There is no option to download all ebooks at once, but you may use third-party download managers to speed up the downloading.
Some of the ebooks have been made available last year as well, so that you will notice that some cover older versions of Microsoft products and not the latest release versions.
No word on whether the listing will be pulled in the future, or if remains available online.
Now You: What's your take on the giveaway?
Say what you will, the price is right!
I’m planning on leaving the Microsoft ecosystem sometime soon, so most of these books are of limited use to me. However, I’m sometimes called upon to help out my dad, who has Windows 10 on one of his computers, so I nabbed some of the Windows 10 titles just in case. I was also vaguely thinking about trying to use a PowerShell script to delete my older FreeFileSync-generated backups (which accumulate indefinitely) in some kind of vaguely intelligent, automated way, so I downloaded the PowerShell stuff as well. Most of the time I just google for specific answers to whatever problem I’m having, but books like these might be useful to people who need a more complete grounding in how Microsoft products work.
tradepub.com has more books available.
The referenced link is written by Eric Ligman, Microsoft Director of Sales Excellence Blog. Note the word “Sales”. Hyperbole is to be expected, and is a common form of distortion of the language these days. It’s New Guy talk, but can be useful in its own way.
Thanks Marin; gone through some of this “truckload” – seems rather a van, some might be useful to refresh one’s memory on few tricks we already have forgotten.
“Use Reset to restore your Windows 10 PC”. That’s one of the “million of ebooks” generously offered by Microsoft (300, actually). It’s a 5-pages Word document with a lot of white space, a lady’s picture, and a few instructions straight out of the manual.
http://ligman.me/29yWAAO
Literally thousands of websites (this one included) publish daily, for free, how-to articles which are far, far more useful and original than this one.
Really, this “offer” is downright insulting on behalf of Microsoft. Force people to migrate to Windows 10, make Windows 7 upgrades a nightmare when they refuse, thoroughly ruin the Windows update system, and make terrific “free offers” such as this one.
I have browsed this list every year for some time, and never found anything worthwhile for my use. I can understand this is aimed at developers and administrators, but still. The web page is extraordinarily user-unfriendly, and the written matter itself is of dubious interest. This really looks like a dump, in contents and presentation alike. It’s completely unworthy of a huge corporation such as Microsoft.
Untold numbers of non-profits or even individuals give out educational material far more useful than that.
The snake-oil salesman language is repulsive, too. You’d really think Microsoft is making you a big favor, while it’s dumping in a disorderly manner what is nothing more than a knowledge base / help file for different pieces of Microsoft software, which is, or should be free anyway, and certainly should be accessible in a far more orderly manner.
The Microsoft employee doing this pretends to offer “millions of free ebooks”, which in plain English means of course millions of different titles, and of course it doesn’t do that : there are only 300 “ebooks” or so, which is nothing for Microsoft, and of course, by millions, he means “I reckon there will be millions of downloads of that puny selection of ebooks”.
They lie through their teeth even when giving out something for free, and they are making a circus out of it in order for the unwashed masses to ponder the infinite generosity of Microsoft. How disgusting.
I think you might have issues. Or maybe you are just overreacting without knowing the developer culture or culture at MSDN in general? Whatever, this comment of yours is rather.. well, silly.
I think you have issues, and your father did not teach you manners. Satisfied ? I don’t care about “developer culture”. If you represent developer culture, then developer culture is a horrible thing. I think this comment of yours shows that you have a slave mentality. Unless you work for Microsoft, and then you have a slave master mentality.
It’s funny how, each time one makes a negative comment on tech sites, there is always a fanboy coming out of the woodwork to show how much he is enslaved to whatever merchant is being discussed.
Also, things are given out for free, and some people just get enraged when they can’t have things for free. Criticize the business giving out trinkets to the geeks, and some geeks will show their fangs, because, you know, the Master might get angry, and he might stop giving out trinkets. And then, life would become unbearable.
The lengths to which some people will go to show how much they hate freedom and love being slaves to tech products and tech corporations…
Total blessing! Thanks for not using “tons” and using the creative mind to arrive at something so simple as “truckloads.” Hyperbole or not, I’ve yet to find a distinguished author use “tons” in his/her novels.
¡ bendición total! Gracias por no usar “tons” y usar la mente creativa para llegar a algo tan simple como “camiones”. Hyperbole o no, todavÃa tengo que encontrar un autor distinguido utilizar “toneladas” en sus novelas.