Book Review: Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB
Well, that’s a mouthful of a title. But there it is. It isn’t a super in depth review but some of my topline thoughts on the book. I think it gives a great overview of the technology that helps you get up to speed much faster than simply hitting the online docs and going for it. It isn’t a must have, by any means, but I guess a good to have. I posted it up on Amazon and gave it a 4 star rating, but really would have preferred a 3.5 star. Here goes:
This is a good overview of the suite of services that comprise Amazon Web Services (AWS), I’d have given it a 3.5 star rating if I could. It talks about all of them, but it spends the bulk of its time, very reasonably, discussing S3 (the persistent storage system) and EC2 (the compute cloud - basically Amazon’s Rackspace in the clouds) - each getting about 100 pages devoted to it.
As others have noted it is out of date - but any book would have the same problem due to the moving target that AWS is. The biggest news is that EC2 is going to be getting persistent storage, which I believe will change the game completely when it is rolled out to the public. Instead of needing some elaborate connection with S3, now instances will behave much more like a typical physical machine with real disk drive. The book, on the other hand, provides almost no real advice on how to deal with the problem of non-persistence of EC2’s current storage mechanism. This is a signifcant problem that everyone will have to deal with and glossing over it is a failing of the book.
This is also a Ruby book, which I found fairly annoying. Nowhere in the description does it suggest that it is done in Ruby. And while Ruby certainly is trendy these days, the actual number of Ruby developers is small - it gets undue weight in computer texts. At the end of the day, though, it generally provides the actual request strings and XML requests and responses for non-ruby folk to come to their own conclusions.
This is a worthwhile book to get if you’re interested in quickly getting a good and broad idea on how to work with AWS. It will give a good foundation to get more out of the documentation and forums found on Amazon’s AWS site itself.
