Customer Reviews

Amazon Web Services Made Simple: Learn How Amazon EC2, S3, SimpleDB and SQS Web Services Enables You to Reach Business Goals Faster

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The title is misleading. In fact, the 2nd page of the book has the title:

Amazon Web Services 100 Success Secrets

Each section of the book is mostly 1 page long, some 1.2 pages long.
Clearly someone was paid for 100 very short essays, like:

The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing

The grammar in the book is terrible. It appears a 1st year college
student has compiled a 1st draft copy and successfully published it
without it being edited.

Somewhere in the book I noticed a section with the phrase:

"...using it is."

and from that I could discern the nationality of the author which makes
reading very tidous when you have to stop and re-read the content and
try to convert it to English.

In my opinion, I got only $5 worth of what I spent on the book, and most
of that is in the entertainment I got thinking about what it would be
like to sit and listen to the author trying to sell me some product in
person without laughing.

This book is indeed very very poorly written, many sentences don't even make any sense, some look like they have been translated by Google Translate and not checked.

Many points are inacurate or even wrong. Some services proposed on top of AWS are presented as being AWS.

Yes it does look like a patchwork of cut and paste from blogs submitted into Google Translate.

Please stop buying this book, and get the OReilly instead.

If you've ever read a blog and thought "huhh...?" - that's this book is like for over a hundred pages. I met a guy once at a conference who told me his service is to compile blog entries into "books" for marketing purposes. This is like that kind of book, except without editing.

See the other review by P. Smith for details

This book's "chapters" remind me of the messages that you can find inside the Chinese fortune cookies.
Cryptic, poorly translated and useless.

An excerpt from page 77:

"GoGrid is very phenomenal with its ability to install and
set up Windows and Linux servers in just a few minutes without
the need for a complex installation process and configuration."

Whoever wrote this book just went over the internet copying and pasting random stuff that seemed to fit together.
Don't waste your money on this.

In reviewing this book, I really don't even know where to begin. I guess I can start by saying I have never been quite so powerfully underwhelmed by the quality of information, organization and expertise in any technical publication I've ever read, and I've certainly read my fair share. I truly could not have been more disappointed.

As my purchase of this book would suggest, I consider myself somewhat under-informed in the area of AWS and effectively leveraging these products and their feature sets in my applications. However, it was clear almost immediately as I started reading that my cursory familiarity with the topic was more than enough to rival this author's expertise. I don't believe I'm exaggerating when say that anyone who has read the service descriptions on the AWS website, in so doing, has already gained more insights into the topic than can be found in this book.

There is absolutely no applicable technical information to be found in anywhere in the book. Instead, there are many short chapters that are poorly edited, poorly organized, poorly thought out, and poorly written. Each consists essentially of a free-form stream of thought that at most may contain some anecdotal information and a reference related to the topic. Just as often, it won't even accomplish that. Worse yet, many of these wandering diatribes are redundant and repetitive, as are the paragraphs within them. These would not make good blog posts or interoffice emails, much less meet the standard expected from a book-form professional technical resource.

The grammatical awkwardness of the book's subtitle (which I didn't pick up on before I purchased it) is only a very small taste of the tortured English used throughout the book. The form, prose, and grammar used by the author (or rather, the lack thereof) may well be the only thing powerful enough to overtake the lack of any substantive information as this book's chief flaw.

I don't like to leave all-negative reviews and I wish I could find something good to say or point out, but I think that's a lost cause in this case. I just hope I can save others the same disappointment.