Developing with Google App Engine (Firstpress) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I was really looking forward to reading this book. I've been working with the Google App Engine from the first week it was released, but as a Python newbie, I still thought I'd get a lot out of a book dedicated to GAE development.
Unfortunately, the book doesn't go far enough beyond the Google online documentation to be useful. The book is thin, but it also uses an incredibly large font size throughout. It's like a junior high school student trying to stretch a book report to meet the teacher's page number requirement.
There are plenty of topics that warrant discussion but are strangely absent. Performance profiling and the performance of the datastore are topics that many developers are struggling with but the book says little or nothing on these topics, and others.

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Google has been able to create a massively scalable architecture so that they can run their applications on literally hundreds of millions of machines without a hitch. Now they are making that technology available to the public in the form of Google App Engine. This book discusses what it takes to develop cloud computing applications using the GAE and walks you through the process of not only developing the applications but also deploying them.

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Beginning Java Google App Engine Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I was very frustrated with my purchase and I was contemplating to write a review out of frustration. However, after I've seen the 5-star reviews from other users, I couldn't believe my eyes. One review was raving about the code samples (absolutely ridiculous) and then I saw one other reader leaving a comment for the review saying that he's been working on the sample code for weeks and still couldn't make it work and I can relate to that.
I pre-order this book from Amazon and when I start reading it, it was a total disappointment. I've been working on GAE/J for a while now and I bought this book specifically to learn more about Google Accounts. The example projects are not complete and it requires you to fill in the blanks to make them work. I've also looked at the other chapters and they lack in content. The book tries to give you overall, breadth-first view of the technology (as you would expect from a beginner level book), but while doing so it mentions about bunch of GAE topics, but fails on giving good coverage for that topic. Especially in chapter 4, when the author(s) talk about frameworks, they don't mention about gotchas on how to make these frameworks work at the first place, because if you're using Spring, BlazeDS and GraniteDS (or any other frameworks, you need to do certain tweaks to make these frameworks/technologies/APIs work with GAE, because some of the Java APIs are "black-listed" by the App Engine for the obvious reasons.
If you're a beginner, this is not a book for you. If you're advanced, then again this book doesn't give you enough in-depth information of the GAE/J topics. In conclusion, it's sad to say, but this book is useless! You can save money just by going to Google's App Engine website and find more up-to-date and complete information, because they keep changing/upgrading the SDKs for GWT and the App Engine almost every month.

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Google App Engine is one of the key technologies to emerge in recent years to help developers build web applications. A great number of the developers approach the App Engine are Java developers, and this title is especially focused for this large audience sector.

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