No books are required for the IT course. Josh has ensured that there are no additional costs for the course, except for one potential caveat mentioned within the course.
Every lab in the course is done in Azure (Microsoft's cloud platform) which requires a credit card to sign up. When signing up, you get $200 worth of free Azure credits which is more than enough to finish the course (by a lot). The caveat is, the credits will expire in 1 month. If you take longer than a month to do the labs, you can either:
- Create a new Azure tenant with a different credit card and email to get an additional free $200 of credits, or
- Continue using your existing subscription on a pay-as-you-go basis
If you opt for pay-as-you-go, assuming you continuously clean up your cloud resources as advised, you shouldn't spend over $20 to do all the labs.