Serverless Handbook for Frontend Engineers: Dive into modern backend. Understand any backend.

by Swizec Teller, Stas Kulesh (Illustrator)

With Serverless Handbook, Swiz teaches the truths of distributed systems – things will fail – but he also gives you insight on how to architect projects using reliability and resilience perspectives so you can monitor and recover. ~ Thai Wood, author of Resilience Roundup How do you dive into modern serverless backend? You pick a project and start Googling! You'll find hundreds of resources. By experts for experts. All assuming you're a seasoned backend engineer with decades of experience. They're full of weird terms, strange concepts, and new references. Soon you'll find yourself reading obscure comments on GitHub issues and StackOverflow trying to glue it all together. You're learning lots of little details, but how does it all fit together? That was me in 2018. Tired of traditional backend complexity I just wanted to run some quick JavaScript on the cloud. What followed was a rabbit hole so deep it made my head spin. The whole time I wished there was a clear book for backend beginners. Someone who's good with JavaScript, knows the basic concepts of backend, and wants to truly understand the mindset and tactics of modern backend development. Serverless Handbook for frontend engineers is that book. The resource I wish I had 15 years ago when I wrote my first server, 3 years ago when I discovered serverless, and every moment in between banging my head against issues in production. Serverless Handbook is a guide from the trenches. No academic bullshit ✌️ Here's what early readers had to Serverless Handbook taught me high-leveled topics. I don't like specific courses with source code (unless it's the exactly thing I want to build) but these chapters helped me to feel like i'm not a total noob anymore. The hand-drawn diagrams and high-leveled descriptions gave me the feeling that i don't have any critical "knowledge gaps" anymore I'm using these skills on some serverless projects in a dayjob. Also very convenient to use with my side projects. The code examples! I like that you included a lot of code examples. It sparked my interest in serverless. Since reading the book I've taken a few courses/workshops in serverless but this was the book that started the serverless journey for me. Can't wait to build a micro SaaS app with my friends Serverless Handbook takes you from beginner to solid full-stack engineer. It shows you the mindsets and tactics to use with any backend. It talks about distributed data processing, designing a REST API, how to build GraphQL, handling authentication, and keeping your code secure. Every chapter helps you choose what to do. Because your project is unique and understanding beats cookie-cutter recipes. This book is a why, not a how. But there's enough how to start you off :) Serverless Handbook is everything I wish I knew about backend programming 10 years ago. This handbook is a fantastic overview of what it means to embrace serverless technology. After explaining what the heck "serverless" really means, the book digs deep into the core elements of serverless in an easy-to-follow illustrative manner with ready deployable code! I'm highly impressed by Swizecs's approach to teaching devs how to adopt new serverless technology ~ David Wells, Serverless Framework cor

260 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 28, 2021

Reviews

[Federico A · Rating 3 out of 5]

I must agree with other reviews. Book is a great introduction for people who have never heard about serverless but really far away from a "handbook".

Only code solutions available are for the most trivial examples (hello world). More interesting chapters have no examples and there are a lot of biased scenarios that feel like "trust me, I've been doing this for a long time".

Examples:

- "Azure: Microsoft's answer to AWS and it's hard to find people in the wild who use it".
- "Relational databases is almost always the right choice".
- "NoSQL databases can't have relational data" (no mention of DynamoDB with single table design).

[Zoltan]

Great introduction to serverless

Concise, to the point warm up for your journey into Serverless. Reading it feels like you're talking to a skilled engineer, who had already learnt the hard lessons in the topic. Swizec gives you some great entry points in a tangible format that you can use as a solid ground to build on. He demystifies base concepts and even shows you gotchas. Great read.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a valid introductionary book, but it feels very light on the details. Lots of "trust me, do it like this", which are correct since I know from my developer experience, but I felt a bit hungry afterwards because there were not enough details, examples and actual "best practice" patterns fully implemented, that are specific to the serverless architecture.

[Chris Villanueva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helpful, but limited.

I didn’t see new insights that couldn’t be found on Medium or Youtube. The book does a great job informing the user on important tradeoffs for specific design strategies. But those strategies could have been developed a little further to be more actionable.