Customer Reviews

Amazon Cloud Computing With Java (Amazon Cloud Computing With 'X')

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

We purchased this book as a teaching aid for one of the courses at our university. However, I would not recommend it to students (or anyone at all). I won't go into details about the writing style itself - maybe having this book proof-read by someone would've helped.

The chapters in this book can be roughly categorized into two types:
- screenshot walkthroughs of the AWS web UI
- building applications around the different services Amazon offers

Obviously, the latter are the ones most interesting to potential readers. Here, the author basically explains implementing a Swing Application. The focus lies not so much on the AWS API, but rather on different Swing components. Hence, a better title for this book would've been: "Amazon Cloud Computing with Java Swing". But even this would be misleading, as there is virtually no emphasis on the Cloud aspect.

The layout of this book is horrible, especially for listings. You're better off downloading the source code from the author's homepage. Apart from figure captions, headings and URLs the book is only plain text without any formatting, so there is no straightforward way to differentiate regular text from commands, source code references etc. On any given page, there is about 25% text, while the remaining 75% are either pictures, listings or blank space. Obviously, this book has been hasty compiled in MS Word and apparently there hasn't been time for a galley proof. My guess is that this is also true for the Kindle version as the reviewer of another book (HTML5) in Kindle format complains about the layout as well.

Overall, I'd give this book a 2-star rating based on the contents, while the layout/composing receives one star.

Interesting side note: the guy on the back cover of Yadav's books (at least the ones that can be looked inside on Amazon) is always the same and naturally, he praises all of Yadav's books to the skies.

The aim of the book is "1 Weekend, 16 hours, 8 hours a day, 15 odd excercises... and get started with professional AWS development"

Unlike other books where each chapter is sent to multiple reviewers, this book is sent in entirity to a team of about 20 developers in a company who run through the book and execute all the excercises. Not many companies would give me access to dozen odd developers for this excercise. Without knowing anything about AWS and with this book to guide you, you will get started with AWS in 2 days (fulltime) and about 5 days (part time).

For example, I personally don't believe that languages should be taught I believe the design elements of programming languages and implementation of languages itself should be taught. Likewise I don't think this book or any AWS book should be used for teaching people, AWS is best self learnt just like one learns Ruby on Rails over a week by himself. The best documentation for an API is the API docs which AWS provides anyway. The only way I could add value e.g. to illustrate AutoScaling and LoadBalancing for example is to build a small swing app (because a web app doesn't make sense in such a case), implement the API calls and then cover the AutoScaling/LoadBalancing creation/admin workflow with screenshots. In real life someone would write a command line app in Java to do the same thing for his dev/production environments. On .Net he might use Powershell, just like on Linux admin's use perl/shell scripts. Sadly thats all there is to it. From a practitioners point of view the book does exactly mimic what they would normally do over AWS with the API's. The magic of AWS is behind the scenes and not in the API itself.

Even today the book is comprehensive apart from notification service which AWS launched recently. AWS console doesn't let you do everything, the only way is to develop a tool and showcase how everything is done.

If we step outside US/UK we would see that non-native english speakers wish more books were written for them. Pictures are good, I love pictures ;-) My book is targetted to non-native english speakers as well. I think a practitioners book on one extreme can be just a series of screenshots without any text, or even a video without any audio track ;-) If practitioners can SEE it being done and KNOW thats the way it works they will put the pieces together and figure out the rest themselves.

In the world of consulting we talk about an important concept "Low Hanging Fruit... Initial Success" Most people abandon adopting or learning something becuase they face hurdles and fail initially and they giveup forever or put the thing on hold (which they never resume). This book will get a practitioner across all hurdles, show him how to work AWS. I have never heard a practitioner (who is capable of reading Linux Man pages ;-)) complain he couldn't get started with AWS after reading this book. Which is the aim of this book.

Just my 2 cents.