Practice with Amazon Web Services

Amazon serves as an example of using web services. I suggest you read this blog by Nick Morgan from Twitter. In this blog, he describes how you can get set up for Amazon Web Services. They are not free, but there is a free tier that you can use (you get 1000 requests for free, after supplying them with a credit card.)

Setup

After getting an account with Amazon Web Services, you will need to obtain two keys: your Access Key ID, and your Secret Access Key. You can use these keys on this website. This will generate a signed URL that can be used for 15 minutes to perform a search.

Generating a Signed URL

You will see a sample URL loaded for you for a Harry Potter search. You can modify this textbox similarly to the way I did below.

http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService
&Version=2011-08-01
 &AssociateTag=jack
&Operation=ItemSearch
&SearchIndex=Music
&Keywords=castle+of+glass+linkin+park

Note that I added a dummy AssociateTag ("jack"), changed the index to music, and added different keywords. The result of this URL is this XML document. You can see that this search returned three items.