AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional Certification and Beyond
Adam Book's "AWS Certified DevOps Engineer" 638-page book offered a decent foundation for the official exam, but I held off on reviewing it until I completed the test. My initial concerns were its alignment with the older DOP-C01 exam objectives while the actual exam was based on DOP-C02. Furthermore, AWS announced the deprecation of CodeCommit and OpsWorks at the recent re:Invent, rendering some portions of the book outdated. (I suspect the exam was adjusted already, as only a question per each deprecated topic was asked.)
The book is divided into four sections with 24 chapters: "Establishing the Fundamentals," "Developing, Deploying, and Using Infrastructure as Code," "Monitoring and Logging Your Environment and Workloads," and "Enabling Highly Available Workloads, Fault Tolerance, and Implementing Standards and Policies," along with an "Exam Tips and Tricks" section. Fortunately, all chapters are still valid on DOP-C02.
As an author, Adam possesses strong writing skills, making the reading smooth and easily comprehensible. However, there are two content shortcomings:
While it provides valuable information, each chapter includes knowledge-testing questions and a 31-question mock exam at the end; the book is insufficient for exam readiness. It is a helpful refresher for individuals with AWS DevOps knowledge and a good foundation for beginners, but it is not enough to push you beyond the passing grade.
The exam emphasizes the interaction between AWS services and automatization, while the book primarily focuses on service descriptions and key features. Essentially, expect half-page-long questions asking, "Given a problem A, how would you efficiently implement solution B using services C, D, E, F, and G?" rather than "What are the supported features of service X?"
Despite these minor shortcomings, this book is a valuable resource. I've learned new things from it and recommend it to those embarking on an AWS DevOps journey. You'll find it an enjoyable read.
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional Certification and Beyond: Pass the DOP-C01 exam and prepare for the real world using case studies and real-life examples by Adam Book (Packt Publishing, 2021, 638 pages).