Books for Amazon Mashups

John Musser, September 26th, 2006

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Continuing the series on books for mashup developers — last week Flickr Mashup Books — here is a quick summary of books that can help you build mashups with the various Amazon APIs.

Note that the Amazon APIs are quite popular with 94 Amazon e-commerce API mashups listed at ProgrammableWeb. And you can use the Other Amazon APIs link on the left navigation of that page to see the 10 other Amazon APIs.

• The Web Developer’s Guide To Amazon E-Commerce Service: Developing Web Applications Using Amazon Web Services And PHP: by Jason Levitt. Published in May 2005 with good coverage of their core e-commerce API with code focused on using PHP 4 and 5.
• Professional Web APIs with PHP: eBay, Google, Paypal, Amazon, FedEx plus Web Feeds: by Paul Reinheimer. Just published this summer it covers Amazon plus a variety of other APIs (as you can tell from the long title). Has a good practical feel and the inclusion of web feed programming is key since that’s such a central piece of so many mashups. Being new it covers the latest versions of the APIs, which isn’t true for some of the other titles (see below).
• Amazon.com Mashups (Wrox): Due in January from experienced mashup developer Francis Shanahan, creator of Zuggest and the cool Zollage. Looks like it will most of the key elements of Amazon’s ecommerce API and their S3 API and combining those with other web services out there.
• There are a couple of other Amazon API-related books but are older and do not use examples from the latest API version: Mining Amazon Web Services: Building Applications with the Amazon API by John Paul Mueller, Real World Web Services by Will Iverson, Amazon Hacks by Paul Bausch as part of the good O’Reilly Hacks series.