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Learning AWS
This book is targeted at expert programmers and architects wanting to learn AWS. Some familiarity with Spring, MySQL, and RESTful web services is assumed.
236 pages, Paperback
First published August 23, 2015
5 people are currently reading
22 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 12, 2015
After almost 10 years since the EC2 service was first launched, Amazon still securely controls the IaaS market, despite the number of contenders significantly increased since. This dominance resulted in legions of start-up entering the PaaS market, building their services on top of AWS, as well as in an abundance of blogs and books dedicated to it. Part of this literature covers a specific service and thus targets a small niche; other parts give instead an overview of the services or a good part of them. Learning AWS belongs in the latter category: it targets DevOps and Cloud Architects with little or no experience with the AWS and aims to teach them about the basic features of the key services, so that they can easily get started. Yea, yet another introduction to some of the services of the Amazon Web Services.
Writing a book that introduces the reader to the whole Amazon ecosystem is hard. Not because the services are hard to understand and/or their features keps secret. On the contrary, the difficulty comes from the fact that, on the one hand Amazon provides an excellent and very detailed documentation, which they often update; on the other hand, the internet and the bookstores are invaded by a horde of articles and books, respectively, that do the same. So, while the task per se is easy, it is instead very hard to provide the reader with value that make the purchase worth it.
The very first thing that grasps the attention of the enthusiast reading the book is the presence of two kinds of images: some are very detailed and colorful, while others are very spartan and all in black and white. The former are screenshots taken from Amazon (not sure if from an ad hoc session or from the official documentation itself), while the latter are made by the author. This discrepancy definitely lowers the overall quality of the text. Plus, let’s be honest: black and white is good for Casablanca. In 2015 I do expect high quality colorful images and schemas. Mainly from a book that goes for 49.99.
Up to chapter 3, the reader is slowly taken through the steps required to launch both an EC2 and an RDS instances, and a security group. Slowly here means that the reader, who is supposed to be a DevOps or a Cloud Architect, is presented with 3 pages plenty of images to teach him how to register to the AWS services, just like filling a form was that hard. The book is agreeable and friendly to read, no doubts. Still, we are told what we have been told over and over in these long 9 years: don’t store sessions on the EC2 instances; create stateless applications so that they scale out; avoid single point of failures. Any Cloud Architect should know this already, despite being completely new to the Amazon Web Services.
Starting with chapter 4 the discussion moves to scalability. Again, lots of nice screenshots and black and white schemas that get DevOps, with an (over) friendly step-by-step approach, through setting up other basic services, such as ELB. This goes on until the very back cover. Another disturbing things that repeats through the book is that each and every option of every service introduced by the author is listed. Mind it, listed, not explained. Just like a reference.
Wrapping it all up, this book is not worth the purchase. It does not provide anything that Amazon does not freely give to any beginner already, including the reference to each and every option of their services. Official documentation apart, the bookstores are plenty of better and more affordable alternatives.
As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!
Writing a book that introduces the reader to the whole Amazon ecosystem is hard. Not because the services are hard to understand and/or their features keps secret. On the contrary, the difficulty comes from the fact that, on the one hand Amazon provides an excellent and very detailed documentation, which they often update; on the other hand, the internet and the bookstores are invaded by a horde of articles and books, respectively, that do the same. So, while the task per se is easy, it is instead very hard to provide the reader with value that make the purchase worth it.
The very first thing that grasps the attention of the enthusiast reading the book is the presence of two kinds of images: some are very detailed and colorful, while others are very spartan and all in black and white. The former are screenshots taken from Amazon (not sure if from an ad hoc session or from the official documentation itself), while the latter are made by the author. This discrepancy definitely lowers the overall quality of the text. Plus, let’s be honest: black and white is good for Casablanca. In 2015 I do expect high quality colorful images and schemas. Mainly from a book that goes for 49.99.
Up to chapter 3, the reader is slowly taken through the steps required to launch both an EC2 and an RDS instances, and a security group. Slowly here means that the reader, who is supposed to be a DevOps or a Cloud Architect, is presented with 3 pages plenty of images to teach him how to register to the AWS services, just like filling a form was that hard. The book is agreeable and friendly to read, no doubts. Still, we are told what we have been told over and over in these long 9 years: don’t store sessions on the EC2 instances; create stateless applications so that they scale out; avoid single point of failures. Any Cloud Architect should know this already, despite being completely new to the Amazon Web Services.
Starting with chapter 4 the discussion moves to scalability. Again, lots of nice screenshots and black and white schemas that get DevOps, with an (over) friendly step-by-step approach, through setting up other basic services, such as ELB. This goes on until the very back cover. Another disturbing things that repeats through the book is that each and every option of every service introduced by the author is listed. Mind it, listed, not explained. Just like a reference.
Wrapping it all up, this book is not worth the purchase. It does not provide anything that Amazon does not freely give to any beginner already, including the reference to each and every option of their services. Official documentation apart, the bookstores are plenty of better and more affordable alternatives.
As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!
June 23, 2016
Interesting entry level book on AWS. Prefered the videos on Linux Academy.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews