Last Friday I appeared in the middle of a Brazilian Twitch live made by a friend and while they were talking and studying, I provided some links full of content to them.
Nowadays, there are a lot of free content on internet. Not only free content, but also content well organized in a good sequence for learning.
So, to help everyone find this content, my idea was to start this blog post that hopefully will stay alive with all the comments and suggestions of new links from all of you, my 2 readers (hi, mom !).
Learning
30 Days to Learn It
This is a very recent and interesting project. You are challenge to complete learning tracks in 30 days and if you manage to do so, you receive a big discount on the certification exams.
Microsoft Learn
Here you can find even additional learning tracks besides the ones available on the “30 days to Learn It”. This site concentrates all the Microsoft Learning content.
SQL Server Workshops
Here you can find very interesting workshops about SQL Server and Azure SQL. For example, the best workshop about SQL Server Big Data Cluster is on this link.
The link uses GitHub features to host the explanation and steps and link back to Microsoft documentations to be sure the workshops will be always updated.
Microsoft Learn Blog
One very important reason to always take a look on this blog is the announcement of Beta Exams. When Microsoft is about to release a new certification exam, they first test the certification in the real world, inviting some people to take the exam almost for free. It’s not totally free to ensure people will not book and fail to attend the exam.
Beta exams have 80% of discount and you receive a voucher of 20% to be used on your next Microsoft exam.
RedGate Free E-Books
Free e-books are always good to learn and RedGate provides many of them.
Communities
Data Saturdays
After PASS death, the community built a replacement for the SQL Saturdays: The Data Saturdays. They are working very well.
Azure Data Community
This is the new Data Community built by Microsoft to keep all Data User Groups together. The community already includes 107 user groups. On this new world where all conferences are made online, why not register for all of them?
Microsoft TechCommunity
This is a very complete Microsoft Community site focused in forums and Q&A for all Microsoft products, but also with many technical publications available
Blogs
I’m not a great blog follower, I prefer to follow people on twitter and choose the blogs according to the publications, but there are some blogs we can’t miss. Probably you know many more, tell us on the comments
You can also take a look on the blog recommendations on the Azure Data Community
Following the right accounts on Twitter can bring to you the most important news in first hand. Microsoft has twitter accounts for each product groups.
Microsoft on Twitter
Azure Purview Azure Data Explorer Azure Synapse Analytics Azure Monitor Azure Weekly Azure SQL DB Azure Data Studio Azure Data Factory Azure SQL Microsoft SQL Server Power BI
Additional Microsoft Related
Data Science
More Twitter Accounts
A good way to find interesting accounts is to take a look on the conversations with the accounts you are already following. You will discover other accounts interacting with these ones and with related interests
Conclusion
The amount of information available for free on the internet is huge. If we manage to get it in an organized way, we not only will learn what we need for free, but we may achieve a level of knowledge way deeper and up-to-date than other regular training methods.
However, everything changes so fast a blog like this one needs to be alive, always being updated with suggestions from everyone, to continue to be relevant.
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