Free E-Books from Microsoft

Microsoft has made a collection of hundreds of free e-books available from its website. The collection features titles covering many major Microsoft products including Office, Windows 8, SQL Server, ASP.NET, and many more, with downloads available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats. While many of the topics are quite complex (Data Mining Extensions (DMX) Reference for SQL Server, anyone?), a lot are ideal for ITGS teachers and students, particularly if they are developing their internal assessment project using Microsoft software.

There are books relating to all Office products, including Quick Start Guides for Excel and Access (I sometimes find students struggle with these) and Getting To Know Office 365 for students who may be using Microsoft’s cloud services. Own Your Space – Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online and BYOD Devices – A Deployment Guide for Education both relate to topics and issues in the ITGS syllabus and could be used as instruction aids or discussion material.

Other titles may be of interest to non-ITGS teachers too, including Developing Critical Thinking Through Web Research Skills and Digital Storytelling.

The entire free e-book collection can be downloaded from Microsoft’s blog. It really is huge, so if you find an example that is particularly useful for ITGS, please do add a comment below.