I realize I could pay the full $50 and get an official O'Reilly copy but I'm not rich and Amazon is selling this thing for $32. But even though the release date was Tuesday, Amazon shows your book only available as a "pre-order." So that has me frustrated.

Also I don't see an option to buy the PDF anywhere on O'Reilly. Is that an option for your book?

Will any of the code you use in the book be available for d/l?

The O'Reilly previews suggest the book is very well written. Four services, That was a lot to take on. I'd be impressed with a scope of just one service. Do you plan on publishing more volumes, to accommodate mturk and all the rest?

I'm sorry it is proving difficult to find a copy of the book, and I'm glad you are so keen to get it.

The official word from the Amazon Web Services Blog is that the book should be available from Amazon.com any day now, so I would recommend waiting. It may take a little while for the distribution channels to fill up, and I am not sure it would be available any sooner even if you purchase it directly from O'Reilly.


The book's code will definitely be available for download. I think the code will be a valuable resource in its own right because it will include example Java and Python service implementations in addition to the Ruby code from the book. There has been a bit of a hold-up making the code available from the website. I'm looking into it.


I don't know if the whole book will be available for purchase as a PDF, this is a decision that will be made by someone in O'Reilly. Let me know if this is important to you and I will see what the official word is on the matter.


I hope that readers will find the book both easy to read and full of useful information. When we started working on it Amazon only had three infrastructure services that we intended to cover. When they released the new FPS and SimpleDB services, we decided they were important enough to delay the book and increase its scope to include them.


My interest is mainly on the infrastructure side so I don't have any plans to write about Amazon's other services.

James, thanks for the update. I see you posted the code examples this morning -- looking at those now. (So far I agree they are a resource unto themselves.) I also notice the first three chapters are available as PDFs for $4 each to non-Safari members; and it looks like Safari members can purchase any chapter for 1 token. Doh!, I want Ch 13 but I'm not a Safari member. Ah well, at 600 pages total and with several compelling services covered, the book writ large actually sounds like a deal. Even if all you did in PAWS was remove the redundancies in AWS' API docs, it will be a useful reference. I'll know something is wrong though if I see the word muck at the beginning of every chapter...

This post has been edited by albeit: Mar 28 2008, 10:26 PM

I read the sample chapter and like it very much.
Wish the book can be purchased as a pdf . I'm at Asia , it would be time-cousuming and expensive to ship the book.

That makes a couple of requests to make the whole book, or at least additional chapters, available as a PDF download. I will look into whether we can do this.

Thanks for the feedback,
James

Usually, Amazon will have our books pretty dang quick. They tend to have them within the week once we actually receive them in our warehouse.

As for PDFs, we tend to release them within 6 weeks after the book is released.