Amazon Web Services in Action - Questions

[Raghavendra Desoju]

Welcome Andreas and Michael to Code Ranch !!

I have been looking for a book on Amazon Web Services which could cover fundamental development concepts and which gives a basic direction on how we could port in house applications to web services based applications.

Had below questions wandering in my mind :-

1. What could we expect from your book?
2. Does it cover/discuss any best practices in building applications in AWS?
3. How far it is useful in preparing for AWS Developer Certification, does it cover any aspects of it?
4. I am a Java programmer with an experience on SOAP based web services, does it need any proficiency in any other language or tools to better understand AWS?
5. What strategy do you advise for programmers like me to get proficient on AWS development?

Hoping your book would give a good kick start

Thanks,
Raghu

[Andreas Wittig]

Thanks for your questions Raghu.

1. What could we expect from your book?
The book introduces the most important AWS services: virtual servers (EC2), private networking (VPC), SQL databases (RDS), no-sql database (DynamoDB), object storage (S3), block storage (EBS).

2. Does it cover/discuss any best practices in building applications in AWS?
Yes, the book covers best practices for security and architecting highly available and scalable systems on AWS. We are focusing on Infrastructure as Code, a very important best practice when working with AWS through all the book.

3. How far it is useful in preparing for AWS Developer Certification, does it cover any aspects of it?
The book is a good starting point if you want to prepare for a AWS Developer Certification. The chapters about S3, DynamoDB, asynchronous and synchronous decoupling (SQS and ELB) are highly recommended to prepare for your certification.

4. I am a Java programmer with an experience on SOAP based web services, does it need any proficiency in any other language or tools to better understand AWS?
We are using JavaScript (node.js) for our examples to explain the AWS API and SDKs. It is easy to transfer this knowledge to Java and the AWS SDK for Java, easily.

5. What strategy do you advise for programmers like me to get proficient on AWS development?
Read Amazon Web Services in Action, dive into the AWS documentation while building pet projects on top of AWS, apply for an AWS certification (associate level), work on your first real-world projects based on AWS services.

[Raghavendra Desoju]

Wow, sounds like this is a very good kick start for me !! Thanks a lot Andreas for a quick clarification !!