You should have an understanding of software development processes and experience in application development and operations as either a software developer or as an IT professional. Irrespective of your background, be it software development or operations, it is important to have a basic understanding of the software delivery processes and the tools involved.

If you have taken the mock exam or want to take the official exam after reading this book and find that you are struggling with specific exam objectives, you can use the following table to find the chapters you need to re-read.

Please keep in mind that some questions may fall into more than one category and that this book is developed without any access to the official exam materials.

While large parts of this book are theory, it is recommended that you experiment with the concepts introduced if you have no hands-on experience with them. Remember, if you intend to sit the AZ-400 exam, this exam is intended for practitioners with two to three years' practical experience. To perform the practical exercises in the book you will require the following:

For more practical experience, links to exercises or labs are included at the end of each chapter. Many of these exercises come from Microsoft Learn and can also be searched at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/browse/?term=devops. Microsoft has also published a cloud workshop that enables you to practice many of the topics covered in Chapters 1 to 6. This cloud workshop can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/MCW-Continuous-delivery-in-Azure-DevOps/blob/master/Hands-on%20lab/Before%20the%20HOL.md.

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9781789619690_ColorImages.pdf

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "In Command Prompt, type hostname and press the Enter key."

A block of code is set as follows:

public class FoodClassifier : IFoodClassifier
{
                public FoodClassification Classify(Food food)
                {
                                // Unchanged classification algorithm
                } 
}
public class FoodClassifierToBeRemoved : IFoodClassifer
{
    public FoodClassification Classify(Food food)
                {
                                // Unchanged classification algorithm
                } 
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

[default]
exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30)
exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100)
exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100)
exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

git lfs install
git lfs track "*.mp4"
git add .gitattributes

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."