Being a Dotnet Developer for over six years, my interest in Azure grew high recently. And I wanted to learn the basics and get certified by Microsoft. My organization provided an opportunity to take up the certification exam with a waiver on the exam fee. So I opted for AZ-204 certification(Azure Developer Associate).

Skills tested for the exam

As given on Microsoft's official website below are the skills tested in the exam.

• Develop Azure compute solutions (25-30%)

• Develop for Azure storage (10-15%)

• Implement Azure security (15-20%)

• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Azure solutions (10-15%)

• Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services (25-30%)

Preparing for the exam

There are lot of materials and courses out there on the internet to read about Azure services. Here I will list down the ones which I used to clear the certification.

1. Microsoft documents

This is the best place to get started with your preparation for AZ 204 certification learning journey. Microsoft provides an Online-Free learning path that will help you to get introduced to most of the Azure services and how to configure them.

2. AZ-204 course in Udemy

There is an excellent Udemy course by Scott on AZ 204 certification. I used this course to learn about a few key areas like messaging services, Redis cache, and cosmos DB. The practice tests given in the course was really nice, which gives a glimpse of the exam scenarios.

3. Thomas and RaviKiran Blogs

In both Thomas and Ravikiran blogs, you can find the areas to cover for all the skills tested in the exam. I mostly used this blog to understand the Azure commands and code snippets for various services.

4. WhizLabs

Probably this one should have been in the first place on this list. Whizlabs Practice Tests is a set of paid practice tests for the AZ-204 certification which gives you exact scenarios and types of questions which will come for the exam. I would recommend taking these tests on the road for preparation. Whizlabs provides unlimited attempts and after each test, there will be a brief explanation of the answers for each question.

That's all I have here, I would love to answer any queries you have while preparing for the certification in the comments section.

All the best on your certification, stay safe :)