Because your workflow is likely to be customized to your tasks, it should be straightforward to write these kinds of tools yourself, with any number of available toolkits, based on what language you're most comfortable using.

There's the straight CLI: http://aws.amazon.com/cli/

And lots of sample code for the various SDKs: http://aws.amazon.com/code

Best to just dive in. If you have any development experience at all, even just scripting, you should be able to figure it out pretty quickly.

Seems like someone is totally &ed about this book!

I so wish I had mod points for you.

Sorry, but this is just another in a long line of corporate pushes to strip away "real education" about science, math, the liberal arts, and culture from high schools and colleges and replace it with "vocational training" about narrow specialties so that they no longer have to pay for it. Fuck that; we need a well-educated populace. If we want a nation composed of poorly educated people working in virtual sweatshops to compete with an unlimited supply of both skilled and unskilled immigrants who drive down wages* to make those jobs less appealing to natives, we're sure well enough down that road by now without hitting the gas every time an employer wants new kinds of vocational sheep.

*: Harvard economist George Borjas has demonstrated conclusively that for every 10% increase in the labor supply, wages are driven down by 3-4%. Think about that every time someone says, "We need more [skilled/unskilled/whatever] immigration to compete." That job would pay more, and thus attract more Americans into that part of the labor market, and/or be subject to greater automation with skilled American operators overseeing it, if not for the already-high levels of immigration endemic in the given field.

Here's an article from as far back as 2007

http://www.bloggingwv.com/print-around-the-world/

If he can use a keyboard/mouse for a while, he could build things, but also work on circuit design (redstone) as well.