beginners guide to Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, RDS, EBS etc) [closed]

Question

Ive been delving into the world of AWS and, with very little server management experience under my belt, I'm quickly getting lost!

I'm looking at creating a system that uses Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, EC2, RDS, S3 (possibly with CloudFront as well) so I can host a user generated content website that also streams video.

So Ive been looking at the following books:

Host Your Web Site On The Cloud: Amazon Web Services Made Easy

Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB

Programming Amazon EC2: Run Applications on Amazon's Infrastructure with EC2, S3, SQS, SimpleDB, and Other Services

If I had to go for one of these what would you recommend?

Most importantly are there any resources you can recommend for a newbie like myself to quickly learn and understand the nuances to AWS?

TIA

Answer 1

Although all of those resources are good, the best way to dive into using AWS is in my experience CloudFormation. With CloudFormation you are able to script most if not all of your AWS resources in a single json script. By writing your cloudformation scripts and looking through the documentation and sample scripts, you will start to get aquatinted with how all of the AWS toolsets work.

Most importantly are there any resources you can reconmend for a newbie like myself to quickly learn and understand the nuances to AWS?

As mentioned above, CloudFormation

However to make sure I answer your question:

If I had to go for one of these what would you recommend?

I have read all 3 resources listed and I found Programming EC2 to be the most useful in understanding the AWS toolset