Among my many sins these past few months, I’ve been quietly working away on a new book for Manning meant to introduce folks to the wonders of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform. Amazon has made it possible to move just about any digital workload from wherever it lives right now (even if it’s been nothing more than an idea in your head) to their secure, reliable, and – often – cost-effective hosting environment. All kinds of stuff uses AWS, from the complete infrastructure of Internet giants like Netflix down to, well, my own bootstrap-it.com site.
The trick is getting over two big hurdles: the first steps into this massive universe can seem really complicated; and simply visualizing what AWS’s nearly 100 separate services actually all do can be a challenge.
And that, hopefully, is where I come in. The MEAP edition of my “Learn Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches” is now online. The book loosely follows the construction of a web application as it grows from its very simple origins to a complex, multi-tiered deployment. All the core AWS services are clearly demonstrated, along with key architectural design principles.
The idea of a MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) is to give you access to a young book while it’s still in development. You’ll be among the first to read each chapter as it arrives, and the Manning team will, hopefully, get your feedback and ideas…which they, in turn, will use to make my life miserable. And that’s a good thing.
The idea behind the “Month of Lunches” series (originally devised by Don Jones – my curriculum director at Pluralsight), is to provide books that teach practical and immediately useful skills, packaged in bite-sized chunks that you can consume – alongside your lunch – in just a few weeks. No excuses.
While not in its final state, the chapters you’ll see in a MEAP will already have been though three or four layers of review. As you’d expect from a strong editorial team like Manning’s, this is in pretty good shape already.
If you’re interested, head over to my book’s MEAP page and subscribe (or just read the free chapter). And enter the discount code mlclinton2 for 50% off.
Thanks for the heads up on the book “Learn Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches.” As an AWS subscriber, this will be very useful for our team.