No books are needed for the IT course. Josh has kept the course at $0.00 additional costs with one semi-possible caveat which he mentions in the course.
Every single 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 to use, 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.