Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB

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 (I figured out what was missing as I'm sure most people will.)Also, the book is out of date.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.

Outdated beyond usefulness at this point in time.

Woefully out of date. I didn't realize this book was written in 2008 until I got it.

what I was looking for

Its in ruby.

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.

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.

'Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB' is a good resource for anyone that is using the Amazon suite of web products and need to learn more about how to get the most out of these powerful set of web 2.0 tools.For anyone that doesn't know what these tools are, here's a quick one-liner about each:S3 - online storage to store and retrieve dataEC2 - online computing to be able to run jobs on a farm of machinesSQS - web messaging infrastructure for computer-computer communicationFPS - flexible payment system for moving money onlineSimpleDB - store and retrieve datasets onlineI like the content of this book and feel that it plays an important part in this niche market but my major qualm is that the code is written solely in Ruby in this book. While that might appeal to a certain market, to only have this communication in Ruby and/or not use a more traditional language of the day I feel is a major mistake. For this reason alone I knock a star off but still recommend it to anyone looking to learn or use these incredibly cool technologies provided by amazon.**** RECOMMENDED