Rating: 
Summary: Interested in Web Services?
Review: There are 3 types of people who might benefit from this book. The first is someone who wants to use Amazon in a non-technical context. Suppose you are interested in posting reviews of your favourite books, or in selling via Amazon's fixed price Marketplace or using its auctions. You can directly follow the instructions on their website. But maybe you want an independent assessment that is easy to understand? If so, here is the book.The second case is someone who runs a website and knows some programming and is interested in perhaps earning some extra income by directing traffic from her site to Amazon. Or maybe using the gigabytes of data that Amazon makes available via its Web Services [AWS] in some fashion that adds value to her site. The beauty of this book is that for a given task [which the author calls a "tip"], 2 key things are supplied. Most importantly, Bausch shows that the task is possible. The proof of concept, if you will. Experienced analysts know that this is often the hardest step. Next, he shows a way to do that task. He has carefully written these in various languages, like perl, JavaScript and ASP. If he wrote a particular task in, say, perl, and you don't particularly care for perl, you can easily recode it in C, C++ or whatever. Straightforward. The third type of reader is someone who has no interest in Amazon, per se. Rather, you are acutely interested in learning and writing Web Services. This is such a nascent field that there is a paucity of real life applications that an arbitrary user on the net can experiment with. Amazon is one of the few companies that currently makes available Web Services with a rich pool of data. If you are keen, Bausch has several tasks where he integrates AWS with those of Google, USPS and other sites. Well worth studying carefully for inspiration. Of course, ten years from now, we will all laugh at how primitive the current Web Services are. But perhaps you can take some ideas gleaned from this book to bring about that very outcome. The whole field of Web Services is so inchoate that maybe just as Jeff Bezos came up with the idea of selling books online several years ago, you might do likewise with an innovative service.
Rating:
Summary: Turning an Amazonian-sized Store Inside out
Review: This book joins the O'Reilly Hacks series, a worthy series. The name Hacks in the series isn't synonymous with "bad" because a hack is also known as a trick or add-on for adding more power to a program or system. The tech-speak is kept minimal, which makes the hacks easy to read and reference. The series has tips for beginners, moderate users, and experts and each hack is represented by thermometer's temperature (high for expert and low for easy) for easy reference. Amazon lives up to its name as it has grown to Amazonian proportions with the addition of apparel, toys, sporting goods, wish lists, reviews, listmania, and marketplace. That barely scratches the surface and it's easy to overlook many of its features. The first part of the book provides hacks for customers as chapters 1 through 3 address browsing, personalization, and community. Each product's page is flowing with plenty of details. The first few pages of the book explain the features that typically appear on a product page. Products have a unique name and it's not just the product name, but rather an ID in the form of an ASIN. Knowing the ASIN unlocks many shortcuts. Many of us, me included, have probably made it a habit to just enter the product's name in the search box and go. A couple of hacks demonstrate how to search more effectively to get the results you want and fast. One of the powerful features of Amazon is the ability to adapt to your preferences so it can make recommendations. Fine tune those recommendations and check out the movie show time listings. Be on time with birthday and event reminders. "What do you want for your birthday?" It's not always comfortable to answer that question, so Wish Lists come in handy. You can do much more than just add items to the wish list. Get hacks on prioritizing it, adding multiple items, and managing it. If you've posted reviews or created lists, then you're already part of the Amazon community. Since you're reading this review, you must value such reviews in helping you decide whether or not to make the buy (I hope this helps!) Chapter 3 covers the community features of reviews, Listmania!, guides, friends, product advice, and sharing the love. Those familiar with these features might be in for a surprise on additional things they can do. Amazon isn't the only one that sells products as anyone can be a seller or an associate as explained in chapters 4 and 5. Explore behind the scenes of selling with details on billing, inventory, and marketing. Get the lesser known secrets for developing a store and sharpening recommendations for improving linking and referrals. Just one chapter covers Web Services, so customers and sellers not interested in it won't feel slighted when they buy the book and have no use for the last chapter. However, the introduction will help anyone better understand Web Services and what Amazon can do with it. Though the book does its job in acting as a help manual for understanding Amazon's features, it does more by sharing tips and tricks you might not have considered until reading the book. My knowledge of using Amazon has grown over the years and the book pleasantly surprises me with things I didn't know. Amazon Hacks has done justice to the O'Reilly Hacks series.
Rating: 
Summary: Use all that Amazon provides
Review: To start, it must be mentioned that the usage of the word hacks in the title does not refer to the media, "unauthorized access" form of the term. It is used in the classic sense in that is describes ways to quickly and efficiently perform authorized operations that are not otherwise available. The managers of Amazon.com have demonstrated a great deal of foresight in making so many of their methods of doing business freely available for all to use. Therefore, all of the tips and code in this book are authorized and encouraged by Amazon. The only "restrictions" are that they want you to perform timely refreshes, so that the information you obtain is current. Given that the data available on Amazon.com is so volatile, this can hardly be classed as a restriction.
As someone who is very active on the Amazon site, I was impressed by many of the tips in the book. There have been times when I have wondered if it was possible to extract specific types of data from Amazon.com, in other words treat it as a database and perform additional queries on it. With the code given in this book, it is possible to extract and organize a great deal more information than can be obtained by using the online tools on the site. While most of the code is Perl script, there is also some ASP code in VBScript and a few segments of XML and XSL code.
With this book, you can become a power user of Amazon, taking full advantage of what is offered on the site. If you are someone who relies on Amazon.com a great deal, then you simply must read it.
Rating:
Summary: Amazon's secrets laid bare
Review: While we all know that Amazon.com is a massive online retailer, it is capable of much more than just helping a customer load up on new DVDs. In fact, learning to effectively use Amazon allows the user to harness an incredible array of information concerning an enormous variety of consumer products. While more intrepid adventurers may be content to machete their way through a jungle of online help documentation, searching for that ever-elusive nugget of information to aid them in their quest, those of us not a part of the "bullwhip and fedora" crowd would prefer to have Amazon's secrets laid bare for us without all the hassle. If you are such a person, then "Amazon Hacks" is the treasure you've been searching for. "Amazon Hacks" gives the reader the tools to make Amazon work to their advantage. Even if all you ever want to do is make purchases or find product information, there is something in this book for you. The more-than-casual Amazon user will want to make use of Amazon's community features, and once again this book shows how to get the most out of these. If you wish to sell something on Amazon, or if you are an Amazon associate, then the information in this book is a goldmine. For web application developers, "Amazon Hacks" discusses Amazon's Web Services API, allowing them to leverage Amazon's database for their own applications. I would have liked to see more information about how Amazon's recommender systems work, and I would have liked to see some acknowledgement of Java in the numerous code examples, but these are minor quibbles. If you are seeking to bend Amazon.com to your will and force it to do your bidding, there really is no better place to start than "Amazon Hacks".
Rating:
Summary: Amazon's secrets laid bare
Review: While we all know that Amazon.com is a massive online retailer, it is capable of much more than just helping a customer load up on new DVDs. In fact, learning to effectively use Amazon allows the user to harness an incredible array of information concerning an enormous variety of consumer products. While more intrepid adventurers may be content to machete their way through a jungle of online help documentation, searching for that ever-elusive nugget of information to aid them in their quest, those of us not a part of the "bullwhip and fedora" crowd would prefer to have Amazon's secrets laid bare for us without all the hassle. If you are such a person, then "Amazon Hacks" is the treasure you've been searching for. "Amazon Hacks" gives the reader the tools to make Amazon work to their advantage. Even if all you ever want to do is make purchases or find product information, there is something in this book for you. The more-than-casual Amazon user will want to make use of Amazon's community features, and once again this book shows how to get the most out of these. If you wish to sell something on Amazon, or if you are an Amazon associate, then the information in this book is a goldmine. For web application developers, "Amazon Hacks" discusses Amazon's Web Services API, allowing them to leverage Amazon's database for their own applications. I would have liked to see more information about how Amazon's recommender systems work, and I would have liked to see some acknowledgement of Java in the numerous code examples, but these are minor quibbles. If you are seeking to bend Amazon.com to your will and force it to do your bidding, there really is no better place to start than "Amazon Hacks".
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