After seeing Rick's Re:invent talk, the one where at about minute 40 everyones' heads exploded, I emailed him (I'm in a very far away other department of Amazon) to ask him for more, because everything he was saying was absolutely not the way my group was using DynamoDB (ie: we were doing it wrong).

He could have ignored my email entirely. He's a busy guy, right? I wouldn't have held it against him at all. Instead, he was super nice, provided me with more documentation, and honestly was just really helpful.

If he recommends your book, I'm buying it.

Shout out to Rick Houlihan! I even made my wife watch his 2018 talk!

aww thats such a nice story to hear :) i would absolutely hope he treats internal customers the same as external.

Thanks! Yea, Rick is awesome and really helpful. He wrote the foreword to the book as well :)

Link please?

Rick has had the most-watched re:Invent talk the last three years.

Here are the links for each:

- 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqfmXiZTlM

- 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaEPXoXVf2k

- 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzeKPKpucS0

Additional DynamoDB links here: https://github.com/alexdebrie/awesome-dynamodb

I wonder if you might talk a bit about what more is in the book than already publicly available in the awesome-dynamodb roundup?

If someone had already successfully using dynamodb in production for a year or two what would be the main value of your course?

If you want a look at the Table of Contents, check it out here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/dynamodb-book/table-of-contents.pdf

For a third-party breakdown of the book structure and content, check out Shawn Wang's review here: https://www.swyx.io/writing/dynamodb-book/

Shawn lists a four-part breakdown that's pretty on-point:

- Background and basics (Chapters 1-6)

- General advice for modeling & implementation (Chapters 7-9)

- DynamoDB strategies, such as how to handle one-to-many relationships, many-to-many relationships, complex filtering, migrations, etc. (Chapters 10-16).

- Five full walkthrough examples, including some pretty complex ones. One of them implements most of the GitHub metadata backend. Nothing related to the git contents specifically but everything around Repos, Issues, PRs, Stars, Forks, Users, Orgs, etc.

The first nine chapters you can probably find available if you google around enough. It's helpful to have all in one place. But the last 13 chapters are unlike anything else available, if I do say so myself. Super in-depth stuff.

I think it will be helpful even if you've been using it for a while, but it really depends on how deep you went on DynamoDB.

Interested in the book.

It's a bit expensive especially with exchange rates but it is what it is, these things take your time and effort to produce.

From the website I cannot see a table of contents for the book unless this is under provide an email for free chapters. Can you please provide a publicly visible table of contents no email required on the site/here?.

This will be the deciding factor for me making a purchase as I'll be able to see what the book covers and if it'll be of use to me having several years Dynamo experience.

How much of the book is directly applicable to Cassandra? I understand that Apache Cassandra is regarded as the “open-source” version of DynamoDB?

The concepts are definitely applicable. You'll need to do some small work to translate vocabulary and work around a slightly different feature set, but most of it should work for you.

And yep, Cassandra is pretty similar to DynamoDB. Both are wide-column data stores. Some of the original folks that worked on Dynamo (not DynamoDB) at Amazon.com went to Facebook and worked on Cassandra. The concepts underlying Dynamo because the basis for DynamoDB at AWS.

For more background on Dynamo, check out The Dynamo Paper: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sos...

If you take Cassandra and remove the power user features whose runtime cost is hard to predict, what you're left with is pretty close to DynamoDB. It's harder to use and incompatible with everything else, but its key feature is not overpromising capacity. We're only considering alternatives because there's no cost saving story around tiered storage.

Rick is awesome. Bought the book without hesitation. Can't wait to dig through it.

I've used DynamoDB in production (small scales only sadly) on a number of projects. Definitely done it the wrong way a few times!

We've all been there! :)

Thanks for your support. I really appreciate it. Don't hesitate to hit me up with any questions or feedback.

Very exciting! Is there any plan to release a physical copy? With reference books I much prefer something I can put on my desk.

Thanks! Honestly, I'm right with you. I would love a physical copy. I did a bit of research and didn't find any great options for making a physical copy of a self-published book for the number of copies I'm expecting to sell (given it's a fairly niche technical area).

That said, if anyone has any great recommendations here, I'm all ears. Actual experience would be best if possible, rather than the first thing you see in Google :).

uh doesnt amazon itself have a physical book publishing service?

Is a HTML version available?