Free Microsoft e-Books on Windows Server, SQL Server, VS 2010 and WP7 Go Mobile

Microsoft has been offering a diversified collection of free e-books to customers interested in getting insight into a range of its technologies for over half a year now, and the company is upping the ante, by providing new flavors of the resources tailored to mobile devices. 

For the most part of 2011, the 9 free Microsoft Press books have been available for download either as PDF documents, XPS files or both. 

This changed recently, with the software giant also starting to provide some of the e-books in formats designed for modern form factors, such as e-readers. 

“We have 9 free e-books available in PDF format. The bonus news is that the Microsoft Press team have now made them available free in two additional formats, DRM-free EPUB and MOBI,” revealed Microsoft’s Ray Fleming. 

“This means you can read them more easily on a wide range of ereaders, notably Kindles and iPads - as well as the Nook, Sony Reader and Kobo eReader. Of course these files can also be read with ereading apps for the various devices on netbooks, laptops, and desktop PCs,” he added.

“The key difference between these formats and the previously-offered PDF and XPS files is that the text is “reflowable,” meaning that it recomposes depending on the width of the screen (or as you resize a Window).”

Microsoft Press did not make a fuss about the update it introduced to the set of free e-books, but Fleming made sure to provide a complete list of the new downloads, which I included at the bottom of this article. 

Not all of the 9 free Microsoft Press books are also available in EPUB and MOBI file formats. The remaining titles continue to be available for download however, as PDF files, and in some cases as XPS.

Users with Kindle devices should download the free Microsoft Press e-books in MOBI format, while EPUB is better suited to other form factors. 

Here is the list of free Microsoft Press e-books (MOBI and EPUB):

• "Programming Windows Phone 7" (Charles Petzold) - download here as EPUB and here as MOBI.   
• "Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010" (Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines) - download here as EPUB and here as MOBI.  
• "Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2" (Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner) - download here as EPUB and here as MOBI. 
• "Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2" (Charlie Russel, Craig Zacker and the Windows Server Team at Microsoft) - download here as EPUB and here as MOBI.
• "Own Your Future, Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft" (Katherine Murray) - download here as EPUB and here as MOBI.

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