Also, if you want to go through a few self-paced labs, instead of docs, Amazon is partnered with an outfit, Cloud vLab, that has a platform for self-paced labs called qwikLAB. They have 3 AWS-related labs, each one requiring the purchase of a token for $29.99.

https://aws.amazon.com/training/self-paced-labs/

Some details:

https://qwiklab.zendesk.com/entries/25029147-Jeff-Barr-7-29-...

A review (in brief, the guy enjoyed doing the labs and learned from them, but felt, for the price, they could've gone more in-depth):

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/review/product-reviews/re...

"Programming Amazon EC2" mentioned using the "Alestic" Ubuntu image rather the one from Canonical directly, but it didn't elaborate on who/what alestic was. I appreciate the information and will definitely look over the site. I already see on the front page that there's a new command line rather than the one the book was using.