- ISBN13: 9780596515812
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Product Description
Building on the success of its storefront and fulfillment services, Amazon now allows businesses to “rent” computing power, data storage and bandwidth on its vast network platform. This book demonstrates how developers working with small- to mid-sized companies can take advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Queue Service (SQS), Flexible Payments Service… More >>
Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB
Excellent resource, but a bit droll. The content is laid out well, there are plenty of (working) examples, and there’s pretty much no fluff to the book at all (in contrast to many O’Reilly books which add a fair amount of humor and distraction).
My chief worry when I received the book was that the title on the spine said “Programming Amazon Web Servcies [sic]“. Yes, really the spine has a typo! The cover page does *not* have the typo. Obviously I was worried that the content might have similar brazen errors. But so far not so.
I’d recommend this book for anyone who needs an EC2/S3/AWS reference.
Rating: 4 / 5
As mentioned in other reviews of this book, there are a lot of Ruby examples. If this book were completely written using Java or C#, this would have been a 4-5 star book. If nothing else, include examples with other languages as well.
Rating: 3 / 5
Well.. I have pre-ordered that book back in Feb and was very anxious to get it. I read it cover to cover and could not find any how-tos, migration paths, implementation ideas, etc.. AWS is a new concept so many IT Directors and sysasdmins who have previously deployed “three tier” structure (DB – MiddleLayer – Web server) are desperate to find how to migrate your typical “data center” / “managed service” / “colocation” into Amazon web cloud (EC2 /S3)- besides lots of Ruby examples that book has little to offer: no structure, no migration. Bottom line: if you want to start fresh and “play” with AWS -this one is for you, if you manage 4 or 5 or 20 data centers and concern about how many servers do you really need and how to move your high availability application to Amazon – you need to look elsewhere.
Rating: 2 / 5
I’d have rated this a 4.5 if I could have.
This is an excellent book covering a very new subject matter. My only major complaint is that it seems a little rushed – I’ve found several typos, and even one section where a couple of lines of (important for that section) code are missing. (I figured out what was missing as I’m sure most people will.)
Also, the book is out of date. However, that is not the fault of the author or the publisher! It is that Amazon’s service changes so quickly. The author and the publisher have made every attempt to mention the most recent changes to the service as of the time of writing, including pointing to places on the web to find out more information.
The material it covers is spot on. It goes through the different services that Amazon offers – including their storage, elastic computing, payment systems, and database systems. It clearly explains the disadvantages and advantages of each system, and provides -useful- code examples (in ruby) of how one can take advantage of the services Amazon provides. (There are examples in other languages, like Python, that the author makes available on the book’s website.) Each section is devoted to a service for the most part, and the book is very readable.
As I said, I’d have rated this book a 4.5 if I could have. Outside of the errors due to rushing, it’s quite useful and quite informative. The code is easy to follow, and I’ve found it very handy for working with the Amazon Web Services.
Rating: 4 / 5
I am reading this book on Safari, where it appeared before the hard copy was available. It also avoided snail mail, and this allowed me to be the first reviewer.
The book is about one of the hottest offerings in the software and surely will be read by many people, if only because it is the first book on this subject. It goes through detailed examples and explains the code. You could, potentially, get most of the same information from the tutorials, excepting maybe the bugs and workarounds which are not for the polished company publications.
My only wish is that the examples were not written in Ruby, which today ranks 10th on the TIOBE rating. The explanation that “it is easy to read” seems weak. I would venture to say the author felt more comfortable in Ruby. The upshot was that I learned to read a new language and found out about some new techniques that are cross-language, such as XPath.
I would recommend this book if only because reading it will make you feel more cozy with AWS, before you go to the tutorials and code samples.
Chapter 3 is a good overview of pros and cons of AWS, which you can show to your management if they are uncomfortable with the cloud.
And good luck on the cloud adventure.
Rating: 4 / 5
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