Full Stack Serverless Book Review
Full Stack Serverless by Nader Dabit is a short read which gets you up to speed on serverless architecture specifically using AWS Amplify tools. The frontend examples use React and the backend uses Amplify CLI tools to set-up GraphQL or Rest APIs. It describes at a high level the various Amplify tools and the AWS technology that is happening behind the scenes of the CLI commands. The best part about this book is that it gets right to coding and doesn’t get dragged down describing minor details. It gets straight into the examples and provides accessible repositories to follow along with. Full Stack Serverless shines in showing you the possibilites of the AWS Amplify ecosystem while not getting too in-depth to keep the pace high throughout the entire book. Details are light and chapters are short which not a negative. Nader Dabit does a great job packing meaning into condensed space which is not a trivial thing, although the focus on AWS Amplify certainly helps the cause. The goal of the Amplify CLI is to abstract the complexity of AWS services into simple commands such as adding authentication via AWS Cognito by running a CLI command “amplify add auth”. Once you’ve read this book, you’ll know the different parts of the Amplify CLI and how they work. You will be able to code a full stack application using AWS serverless technologies including CI deployments.
Full Stack Serverless focuses solely on AWS Amplify. Surpringly, this tool isn’t in the subtitle for the book. That’s one thing to know before jumping into this one. If you’re not interested in utilizing Amplify in your stack, there are other serverless resources out there.
Nader’s Youtube channel is a great resource to learn serverless development. The Serverless Stack is an alternative to the AWS Amplify framework.
Overall, this is a solid book on building serverless applications that you can finish in a couple of days. To get the most out of this book, it’s best if you want to learn more about AWS Amplify at a high level.
Review: 7/10