Customer Reviews

Mining Amazon Web Services: Building Applications with the Amazon API

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

 

 

First of all, I had a feeling that i was going to purchase
useless book. I just wanted to prove my theory and wasted
my money on it. Well, it's good to be a writer these days...
Pick up some hot commercial name for the book, add a little bit
about everything and here you go - you've wrote a book about
Web Services! It's packed of some web links and some discussion
of XML and SOAP and everything else what you can find in the kit from Amazon. All in all, don't expect to find anything useful
in this book. All you need is the kit and some examples from the Web. I'm planning to donate my book to the local library.

good luck!

I knew going in that this would not have much use for me... that's okay, one tidbit of information could pay for the book many times over.

What i got was a rehash of the now ancient history (2003) versions of Amazon Web Services, and nothing useful from a pratical standpoint.

I didn't expect to use the programing stuff (non outdate), but thought the author might throw in at least one example of someone useing this goldmine for a functioning task.

I'm giving a 2 stars because it doesn't have some of the promised programing discussion, but recomend anyone looking to market books, etc to avoid this one.

If you've never been exposed to XML or SOAP and using web services then this is a good book. However, it is by no means a comprehensive treatment of the subject. The reality is that if you download the SDK and spend a little time on the internet you can find all of the same information.

I don't regularly program anything, so I approached this book with more than a little concern about my ability to comprehend it. I've created a few VBA macros for Word, but that's about it. This book got me going very quickly. First, it told me what I could expect and that's something most books don't do very well. After that, it told me that Web services are actually pretty simple, and the author used coding techniques that made it apparent that he wasn't lying. In fact, let me take that back, the first example didn't really need any code--it used a specialized URL to do the job.

I'll admit that I didn't read the whole book, but the author said I probably wouldn't need the whole book in the introduction. My main concern was the VBA examples, but I also tried the JavaScript examples out of curiosity. All of the examples I tried worked as the author said they would on the first try even. All of the details were there and in a logical order.

The highlight of the book for me is that the author tells you what you can do with Amazon Web Services in detail. I wasn't aware that you could do all this stuff with Amazon. I have a nice new Word macro now that downloads all of the latest books from my favorite authors on a weekly basis and prints out a report for me. What used to require hours of searching now takes moments. If you're an Amazon junkie like I am, you really need this book!

I've been hearing a lot about web services, but everything seems to be vaporware or hyped so much you don't know what to believe. This book puts Amazon Web Services in perspective. It helped me to discover the good and bad stuff without all the hype.

At first I thought this was going to be just another Microsoft book, but the author really does cover other languages. My language of choice of Java, but I tried out some of the web page examples too. All the code works great and it includes a lot of comments so you don't get lost.

The author made some aspects of Amazon Web Services especially approachable by explaining them in real English. The licensing agreement description was especially helpful because it helped me avoid potential problems with my application. I also talked with the author over email. He answered all of the book questions I had.

If there is any fault in this book it's that it wasn't long enough. The author covers all of the services, but you have to read about some of them using another language. I guess it's too much to ask to give me every example in every language, but it would be nice. At least you can find everything you need somewhere in the book.

I purchased this book so that I could hopefully get started pulling data from Amazon's API. When I went through the book, I found that the examples used were not explained well enough to my liking.

I have been programming for 5 years, and so upon scanning the programs, I was able to figure out how to do the things I wanted. The book relies on the XML (for the php section), but does not talk about it very much. It also stresses the use of XSLT, which makes XML easier to read.

I would have liked this book to talk about how to manipulate the XML data better, and also the ins and outs of calling data from amazon.

What this book will do for your is take you a few steps forward if you are having problems getting started. But it falls short of going the whole way. The author leaves the rest up to you from code fragments that you must manipulate.

Amazon Web Services provides good readable information; readers who have limited background in working with web services and the technologies involved will benefit. This is a great way to start learning about web services in general and Amazon Web Services in particular.