Review of the book “Programming Amazon Web Services” by James Murty
So I bought this book out of curiosity and the desire to start poking around with EC2. So I sat down over a weekend and plowed through most of this thing with my laptop and brand new AWS account. This is a good book, however I don’t recommend this book for newcomers to the world of programming, network and infrastructure management as this book requires a solid baseline of knowledge in all areas in order to get through the book. In short, this book is for an experienced technical audience.
That said, this book covers (with detailed examples) about everything you will want to do with AWS. Its all here. S3: Simple Storage Service, EC2, SQS: Simple Queue Service, FPS: Flexible Payment Service and SimpleDB. My only issue with the book was that all of the examples are coded in Ruby, which being mainly a Java guy, required more fumbling around than it would have otherwise. The other concern is that this book is likely to become quickly outdated as AWS appears to be a constantly changing and evolving service.
Overall I enjoyed the book, it is filled with details and enabled me to get my first few EC2 instances up and running in no time. Let me tell you; wow is it cool to be able to programatically fire up an Ubuntu server with a few quick keystrokes!
Skill level: Advanced
Recommend: Definitely!
