This book assumes that you are familiar with at least the Java programming language. Knowledge of core Java and JEE is essential if you want to gain better insights from this book. Having a strong understanding of the deployment of a web application in application servers such as Tomcat will help you to understand the flow quickly.
As the application development life cycle will cover a lot of tools in general, it is essential to have some knowledge of repositories, as well as IDE tools such as Eclipse, and build tools such as Ant and Maven. Knowledge of code analysis tools will make your job easier in configuration and integration; however, it is not vital to perform the exercises given in the book. Most of the configuration steps are mentioned clearly.
You will be walked through the steps required to get familiar with VSTS, Microsoft Azure Web Apps, Microsoft Azure App Service Environments, and Microsoft Azure SQL Database.
For Microsoft Azure, you can use a one month trial access. VSTS also comes with a trial account with some restrictions.
