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[edit] O'Reilly 'Programming Amazon Web Services' by James Murty

This book provides a gentler and more accessible introduction to the Amazon web-services than the official documentation. It holds your hand and takes longer to explain some of the concepts and offers some "big picture" perspectives.

Five of the Amazon APIs are covered (S3, EC2, SQS, SimpleDB and FPS). Each API is broken down into a couple of “technical” chapters, followed by a chapter showcasing some real-world, example applications (both hypothetical and/or actual case studies).

You can (pretty much) read the book "out of sequence", so you can jump to the EC2 section without learning about S3 first. This is important because there is a lot of information here, and I doubt many people will sit down and read it cover-to-cover. It's more the type of book where you read about one API, go away and play with it, and then come back for another when needed.

The first thing that struct me is that the book deals exclusively with the REST/Query version of the APIs – there’s not a hint of SOAP in sight! I think this is a really good decision as it boils the web-services down into something all web-developers should be familiar with: HTTP requests and responses.

The example code is written in Ruby, and speaking as someone who has never written a single line of Ruby, I had no problems with it! Typically the examples involve building up an HTTP request and then parsing XML from the reponse – things that should be easily transferable into your language of choice.

Unfortunately, as is probably the case in many technical books, even though the book was recently published (March 2008) by April 2008 it had become outdated! Amazon have announced a number of new bits and pieces which are either missing from the book or that the book contradicts (like saying Amazon do not provide premium support, which they now do). Overall, this isn't a big deal as the book covers the core concepts well, but it's definitely worth checking Amazon for the latest functionality and API changes.

I came to the book familiar with a couple of Amazon's services, but I still got value from it, particularly with the APIs I had not looked into. I would recommend this book for intermediate developers upwards, who are interested in any of the APIs that it covers.

More information can be found on the O'Reilly site at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515812/

Review written by Richard Harrison, May 2008