The AWS You Need to Know Right Now

From an application developer’s point of view, learning AWS isn’t easy. Of course, it’s easier than dealing with an on-premises environment. After all, I don’t have to tear up the floor and lay cables myself. Even so, learning AWS comes with the following difficulties.

1. There are too many features. As a result, you don’t know where to even start.
2. The features change quickly. That’s just how it is, since the cloud space evolves so fast.
3. My infrastructure knowledge is lacking. There are so many areas I just left to the infrastructure team and took for granted…

As an introductory AWS book for application developers, this book has the following merits.

1. It starts with the easy stuff. Thanks to that, you can avoid the situation where you flounder around not knowing where to begin and end up giving up.
2. It builds an app that actually works. As an app developer, there’s no surer way to learn than getting a service up and running.
3. It has lots of screenshots and diagrams. Thanks to that, it’s easy to read on your commute, and even without turning on a computer to do the exercises, it feels like you actually did them.
4. It explains just the right amount of infrastructure concepts, so it’s easy to understand why a given AWS feature is needed and where it’s used.
5. It introduces case studies of building services. They were probably pulled from AWS promotional materials… but they motivate you to learn.
6. It’s a quick read.

It has a downside too. The book is a little dated. The first edition was published on May 13, 2019.

Overall, it’s a good introductory book. But I still have a long way to go.

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