Customer Reviews

Code in the Cloud (Pragmatic Programmers)

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

 

 

This book is not for experienced developers. It is not for inexperienced developers either. The only way I can rationalize this book is by imaging how the author is holding a hand of a very young child guiding him through the development of the child's first web page. It is really very frustrating. The writing is lucid and clear. Everything is covered. The book even has a chapter on CSS. The breadth of the book is very good, but the depth is so shallow, I can't help shaking my head. If you have been developing web apps for any length of time, you have nothing to learn from this book.

Often times I read reviews on Amazon about books that have great content, but are poorly produced. This book is the exact opposite. It is well produced, well written, but its content is worthless. I'm giving it 3 stars because I can't deny that there may be audience out there for this book - very very inexperienced developers just starting out. Maybe they will find it useful.

This provides a basic introduction to the Google App Engine, in Python and Java. It roughly parallels the online tutorials on the the Google site, but develops a bit more in depth, and so I found it to be a useful complement working through the book over a week or so.

I liked this book for pretty much exactly the same reason a prior reviewer panned it -it provides intros to a number of basic languages and frameworks, such Python, CSS, Django, Java, AJAX. An advanced web developer should pretty quickly skim/skip those sections, and a basic developer (like me) would find them familiar and reinforcing.

The printed book leaves a few things out (e.g. import statements at the tops of the program files) so I needed to use the companion source code available online (rather than being able to skim the book and type the examples in myself to make sure I was really following step by step).