Michael Petychakis Application Programming Interface, Technology, Cloud Computing

“Serverless Apps with Node and Claudia.js” an Honest Review

 

Almost a couple of months ago I retweet Slobodan because I was really excited about his upcoming book on serverless!

A few days later I received a very kind message from Slobodan texting me that he would like to send me a draft of the book, in order to send him some honest feedback. That was it!

I was really humbled by his offer and thus I immediately started reading it, even though I had a crazy schedule of my own.

Reading

Reading

 

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Reading a Book the Greek Way

Coffee and Reading

Even more Reading

 

Then, after a month I finished the book and I was in awe! Immediately, I tweeted the guys about the amazing job they’ve done!

The Book

First I am quoting the book in the publisher’s words

First the buzzwords: Serverless computing. AWS Lambda. API Gateway. Node.js. Microservices. Cloud-hosted functions. That’s an impressive-sounding list, but what’s the point? Beyond the buzzwords are real benefits like fast design-to-deployment times, low hosting costs, and efficient scaling and application management, along with real technologies that deliver them.

Serverless Apps with Node and Claudia.js walks you through building serverless apps on AWS using JavaScript. Inside, you’ll create a full project designed to help you understand and apply general serverless design principles and concepts. Along the way, you’ll also discover what Claudia brings to the table as you build and deploy a scalable event-based serverless application that is fully integrated with AWS services including Lambda and API Gateway. You’ll learn to simplify the design and development process so you can focus on getting your application deployed as fast as possible without sacrificing quality. Plus, you’ll learn how to migrate your existing Express apps to serverless!

and the ToC (Table of Contents)

Screen Shot 2018-04-19 at 3.23.59 PM

It is pretty straightforward that the curriculum is more than completely covering a vast area of the material. I understand that this book focuses both the entry-level engineer as well as to the intermediate. It could be still useful for a senior lambda engineer, but since the technology is out only for a couple of years, I don’t expect many people around to call themselves seniors.  Being honest, the content and in general all the material (the graphs, the samples, the jokes), everything was in place making the book a pleasant read apart from just informative.

I personally had in the past an issue with CI/CD and I guess more people could find this useful. There is already a part briefly mentioning it, but it could be a good idea for the future (or a book on its own, ”DevOps on Serverless”). I think intermediate readers could find useful some AWS CodeDeploy example, but still. It is definitely not blocking!

I can totally recommend reading the book if you want to dive deeper into serverless and claudia.js. Personally, I am totally a python guy but that was definitely not a drawback. This book builds on concepts and ideas that lead to a deeper understanding of all the underlying engineer of lambdas.

You can definitely have your hands dirty with code if you want and actually, I recommend this to everyone! I even installed node and Claudia.js to experiment with some of the examples.

I have read already most of the books around serverless that are available on Amazon and most of those are just very introductory or just explore the very basic idea of serverless without ever going into detail.

So…

Finally, I can share my review:800px_colourbox9963402