A Developer's Guide to Amazon SimpleDB (Developer's Library)

[Book Review Team]

Author/s    : Mocky Habeeb
Publisher   : Addison-Wesley Professional
Category   : Data modeling, SQL and JDBC, Distributed Computing, J2EE, Miscellaneous Java
Review by : Andrew Monkhouse
Rating        : 9 horseshoes

If you are interested in the no-SQL database systems or in utilizing cloud computing to set up a database, this book will teach you more than enough to get you started.

Mocky Habeeb (the author) demonstrates his mastery of this subject in providing valuable hints throughout the book. These include simple warnings about certain processes that are "high cost", tuning queries, avoiding throttling server side, altering queries depending on local versus remote queries, and so on.

Although the book is primarily a Java centric book, Mocky also provides sample code in C# and PHP. He also provides comparisons between other cloud providers offerings, and discusses some methods of choosing between schema-less databases and SQL databases.

Finally, Mocky builds an API that makes it easier for newcomers to Amazon SimpleDB to use within their Java programs.

This book is well written, and an easy to read and understand introduction to Amazon SimpleDB.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.

More info at Amazon.com

[Book Review Team]

Review by : David O'Meara
Rating        : 2 horseshoes

The knowledge and experience of the author is not in question, but it doesn't come out in the text of this book.

"Amazon SimpleDB" is not a large book at a bit over 250 pages and even though it is aimed at developers I was expecting some coverage of the practical uses or experience but that is not evident. More on the source code later, but the user tips were often useful but buried in the text and not that accessible.

Sample source code is provided for four languages, Java, PHP, C# and Python but personally the code was niether here nor there.
50 pages worth of the same code covered four times feels like padding, and while it is helpful that each language introduced a library to simplify interacting with the Amazon Web Services, I kept thinking that at some point the book would directly address the Web Services.

In my mind this wasn't the book that the author intended and it falls short in so many areas that it feels unfinished and leaves you wondering what wasn't covered. There are other positive areas about the book but overall for me it was difficult to recommend an audience for this book.

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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.

More info at Amazon.com