AWS Cookbook - Recipes for Success of AWS
The cookbook is not my favorite style of technical books, but I picked it because Jeff Barr wrote the foreword. If you don't know who he is, you likely have never built software on AWS before. Besides, I recognized two names who praised it: Gaurav Raje and Adrian Cantrill...
The cookbook is not my favorite style of technical books, but I picked it because Jeff Barr wrote the foreword. If you don't know who he is, you likely have never built software on AWS before. Besides, I recognized two names who praised it: Gaurav Raje and Adrian Cantrill (bought Gaurav's "Security and Microservice Architecture on AWS" book a while ago and watched Adrian's AWS training).
Ok, back to the book. It has nine chapters but no table of contents despite being 568 pages long. Weird...
When I started reading chapter 1 "Security," I had to stop a few times and re-read the whole recipe to digest the information. The book looked promising and I hoped to learn new tricks. But, the next three chapters "Networking", "Storage", and "Databases" were much easier and telling about ordinary things compared to the first one.
Chapter 5 "Serverless" was nice again; I've memorized two new recipes.
Chapter 6 "Containers". Well.. if you worked with ECS and ECR before, it may look trivial.
In the next two chapters, "Big Data" and "AI/ML," the book changed style. It shifted from a focus on automatization with AWS CLI commands to a basic explanation of running services via the AWS Console.
The last chapter 9, "Account Management," was an introduction to AWS Organization and AWS SSO, instead of the expected comprehensive recipes.
After finishing the book, I believe it was written for developers with AWS experience of one to four years. If one has less than a year, the book will be confusing and hard to comprehend. On the other hand, if one has more than four to five years, it will be slightly useful. And if you are a certified AWS Architect Associate, you can confidently invest time in something else. The exam topics cover almost everything mentioned there.
At the end, if you are looking for lots of examples on how to use AWS CLI or started your AWS journey a year or so ago, then this book is for you.
AWS Cookbook - Recipes for Success of AWS (John Culkin, Mike Zazon; O'Reilly, 2022, 568 pages)