If you plan to use Amazon Web Services to run applications in the cloud, the end-to-end approach in this book will save you needless trial and error. You'll find practical guidelines for designing and building applications with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and a host of supporting AWS tools, with a focus on critical issues such as load balancing, monitoring, and automation. How do you move an existing application to AWS, or design your application so that it scales effectively? How much storage will you require? Programming Amazon EC2 not only helps you get started, it will also keep you going once you're successfully positioned in the cloud. This book is a must-read for application architects, developers, and administrators.
It gives a great introduction to all Amazon Web Services (AWS), not just what they're good for but also hands on how to use them (mostly through command line commands). The book also focuses on several real world products by the authors and how they use AWS. It even goes into what spikes and "Internet scale" popularity could do to your application and how to manage it. For me it was a great read, but it doesn't have focus on the EC2 service as the title implies as it goes through most services on equal amount. If you just want an introduction you can probably just browse around the AWS website.
Conclusion: Read it if you want to learn more about AWS, not if you want hardcore EC2.
Amazon offers a variety web services. This book offers a very good overview of how, exactly, you are supposed to actually use all of these services in real world application deployments.
It was a pretty short book with too many source code into chapters. It covers some interesting parts of running applications under Amazon cloud, but there are no enough details.