I’ve been slowly building up my Azure experience over the past few months and actually plan to release a product using Azure during the next month or two. Programming Windows Azure has been a huge value to me in learning both the basics of the Azure platform as well as the details. It has a great balance of theory verses practice. I strongly recommend this book if you are new to Azure or even if you have experience with Azure. I often find myself going back and re-reading sections to better understand things.
Programming Windows Azure eBook: Sriram Krishnan: Kindle Store
Two of the sections I feel are particularly well written or the ones that talk about Storage and Tables (chapters 7 and 8). The application I’ve been working on heavily uses blob storage and I spend lots of times re-reading those sections. Azure tables is a hard topic to get a sql server programmer like me to get my head wrapped around. Sriram does a great job of talking directly to someone like me to help me understand how and when to use tables.
Again, I whole heartedly recommend this book.