AWS Development Essentials

Great examples. Very good book.

The authors take a step by step approach to familiarizing the reader with the tools and workflow needed to use AWS for a number of purposes. The overview of VPC and AMI setup will help the reader become quickly familiar with a functioning environment but it doesn't talk very much about the huge number of other potential use cases. If you are getting up to speed with AWS this book covers a lot of the initial setup that you will need to be productive. Given my somewhat broader experience with AWS I found much of the book review but for newcomers this book will guide you step by step and covers some of the areas I had figure out myself with simple tutorials. Packt does a good job of publishing timely technology information here and in other books.

It's easy to setup, it's faster than most on its range and it's very affordable.

I think the documents in aws site is better than this book.

This book is poorly written, is very light on actual content, and has clearly not been edited*. The biggest problems with this book are that it's 70% non-information filler interspersed with maybe 30% useful content, presented as links or copied and pasted charts from public locations. The information it does provide is rote data and devoid of the guidance one would expect from an expert in the field of Cloud services. For example, the first chapter informs you of 5 security features provided by amazon: multi-factor authentication, access keys, cloud-front key pairs, X.509 Certificates, and passwords. While it walks you through how to set these up, it doesn't tell you is where each of these are relevant or how you should chose between them. Given how straight-forward the AWS console is, it's a complete joke to spend more time on such walk-throughs than on the guidance that is actually lacking from Amazon's own documentation.*Here just one of many examples showing a clear lack of review: "Therefore, if a user wants their Amazon EBS-backed instance to store volumes, they must postulate them using a block device mapping" Postulate? seriously? Such errors would be excusable on their own, but in this case, they're symptomatic of the entire work.