3.2 KiB
+++ title = "Learn Amazon Web Services In A Month Of Lunches" date = 2020-12-31 updated = 2021-02-12
[taxonomies] tags = ["books", "reviews", "aws", "it", "books:2020", "stars:2", "published:2017"] +++
AWS gives users the networking, compute, and security services they need without making them pay for anything they're not actually using. With almost a hundred individual AWS services, putting all the pieces together is not a simple thing. That's where this book can help.
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Some points here:
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(-) Lots of screenshots. I know this is just a personal issue, not something that is inherent bad, but I have to put this as a negative point for two reasons: First, these images are very low quality in the ePub version; Second, the book focuses too much on the screenshots, without focusing on what the problem, solution and concepts are; "Click there, type this, click complete" happens a lot in the book, which shouldn't be bad if, at least, it explained why you clicked there and typed that. I'm not even sure if the images are still up to date -- some references are really out of date already, like saying to use Ubuntu 16.04. It would be a lot more useful to explain the concepts and then show how to apply them, either by using the web interface of the command line interface.
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(-) Speaking of command line, the book praises the tool, have a full chapter about it, tell how good it is and then... nothing. The following chapters completely ignore it. Again, this seem like a missed oportunity to explain concepts and then show how to apply them using the web interface and the CLI tool.
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(-) I'm not sure who is the target audience for the book. I mean, some things seem to be dumbed down to make easier for people who don't know the technology to understand what's going on, but... would someone that isn't related to the development of an application, that haven't seen or heard about databases and stuff worry about using AWS? 'Cause that's who the book seems focused on: people who just want something on the internet, but have no idea what they want or how to make it work.
(As a side note, the WordPress install could be completely moved to an appendix and keep going with just the concepts.)
- (-) Some things doesn't seem related to AWS itself. For example, the second chapter is only about installing WordPress on a Linux server, and it could be done in any Linux install, even VirtualBox. This is kinda related to the previous point: If someone was attached the development of some web application, saying that you need a database and PHP and related libraries would be enough; but when you have to explain the whole install of WordPres... what's the focus?
The small bits of concepts that are scattered around the images are somewhat interesting, but because they are so tied to the screenshots, a lot of information could be just missed. Or worse, turn people into simple clickers that don't understand why they are clicking this or that button, 'cause all they learnt was that they should click that button.