Martin recommends James Murty's book *Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB* in addtion to Rick Grehan's article and the AWS documentation The examples in the book are primarily in Ruby, with a large amount of HTTP requests and responses and plenty of XML documents displayed. If you download the samples from the O’Reilly Web site for the book, you’ll also get versions in Java and Python.Of course, you can learn what you need from the online AWS documentation, and you should certainly consult that documentation for updates, such as the SimpleDB Query Sort that was released in July. But Murty will get you going faster and more easily than you could with the Amazon documentation alone.Enjoy. Software Development