Amazon Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools (Hacks) by Paul Bausch

Product Description

Amazon Hacks is a collection of tips and tools for getting the most out of Amazon.com, whether you're an avid Amazon shopper, Amazon Associate developing your online storefront and honing your recommendations for better linking and more referral fees, seller listing your own products for sale on Amazon.com, or a programmer building your own application on the foundation provided by the rich Amazon Web Services API. Shoppers will learn how to make the most of Amazon.com's deep functionality and become part of the Amazon community, maintain wishlists, tune recommendations, "share the love" with friends and family, etc. Amazon Associates will find tips for how best to list their titles, how to promote their offerings by fine tuning search criteria and related titles information, and even how to make their store fronts more attractive. And the real power users will use the Amazon API to build Amazon-enabled applications, create store fronts and populate them with items to be picked, packed and shipped by Amazon. And just about anyone can become a seller on Amazon.com, listing items, deciding on pricing, and fulfilling orders for products new and used.
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #87097 in Books
Published on: 2003-08-20
Format: Illustrated
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
302 pages
Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
At its core, Amazon.com is a great big database concerned with lots of stuff--books, of course, but also tools, clothing, films on DVD, kitchen equipment, and lots and lots (and lots) of Harry Potter paraphernalia. Want to wear an Anna Kournikova exercise brassiere while juicing celery (presumably with considerable vigor)? Amazon can help. Need a cricket bat, radar gun, dietary fiber supplement, or vibrasonic molechaser? Amazon has what you need. Which is all great, but the real value of Amazon.com isn't that these things are in the database. The real value of this site lies in the information about all that stuff--reviews, sales rankings, recommendations, and the like--and the large number of ways to access it. Amazon Hacks explains how to get the most out of Amazon.com as an ordinary customer with a Web browser and as a software developer interested in the site's considerable collection of Web Services.

In Amazon Hacks, Paul Bausch documents most of the avenues Amazon.com has opened up for exploration of the database. A lot of his coverage borders on the obvious: Sections on how to "Power-Search for Books" and "Put an Item Up for Bid at Amazon Auctions" aren't too different from Amazon's own explanatory articles. Coverage of how to add an Amazon search box to your own site, and add Amazon Associates item links to various kinds of Weblogs (including Blosxom and Moveable Type) are much handier. Bausch really shines when explaining Amazon.com's Web Services (AWS), the remotely accessible software interfaces that enables programs to search the database. He includes AWS-enabled programs in PHP, Python, and Perl. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to use Amazon.com as a Web surfer, Web site publisher, and software developer. Detailed coverage goes to advanced product search techniques, managing the characteristics associated with your Amazon login, selling through Amazon Auctions and zShops, and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API for Perl, PHP, and Python.

About the Author
Paul Bausch is an accomplished web application developer, and is the co-creator of the popular weblog software Blogger. Among his recent applications is BookWatch, a site that scans weblogs for book mentions, analyzes them to find the most frequently mentioned books, and uses the Amazon API to display the results. Paul is also an accomplished writer, and is the co-author of We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, published by Wiley.
Customer Reviews

Surprisingly good and very informative
I've been using Amazon for years and am an active poster of reviews. I was astounded to see just how much I didn't know about Amazon's resources and capabilities.

Even if you're not interested in programming hacks or using Amazon's API, this is still an extremely informative book for any Amazon user.

It provides excellent insight into how Amazon works and the wealth of information you can derive from Amazon.

Jerry

Amazon's improving usability renders this book unnecessary
When this book was first published, it might have been somewhat relevant. However, Amazon has continuously upgraded the usability of its site to the point that where the answer to any question you might actually have about its features is now on the website, including forums where you can discuss individual books, and even a forum where users discuss the well guarded formula for ranking Amazon reviewers, which one clever person came up with via experimentation. Also, Amazon's interface and features are constantly being changed and upgraded, so that some of the specific information in this book is no longer correct. I give this book two stars only because it is well written, but I strongly advise against buying it.

Nothing special
All of the information in the book could easily be obtained (for free!) from the Amazon Web Services website. In fact, all I learned from this book was that Amazon's online documentation was VERY complete!