Amazon

com is easy. Even novice web users with a bit of time and curiosity can find exactly what they're looking for and complete a transaction fairly effortlessly. Beneath this user-friendly exterior, though, is a powerful application that helps people ...

com are browsing, searching, and purchasing products. If you've spent any time at Amazon.com, then you know it has millions of products in dozens of categories beyond the books for which it is primarily known. Thinking of the site in terms of ind...

It's a number that's unique to Amazon, and it is at the center of the Amazon universe. Many pages and features rely on the ASIN, so the first skill needed in tweaking Amazon is the ability to hunt down and gather ASINs. Finding the ASIN for a ...

Amazon doesn't offer product searches by UPC through their main web site, but they do offer it for music products through their Web Services. Following is a simple bit of JavaScript code that brings up a CD's product detail page based on a UPC....

The easiest path to the page is to put the ASIN in any Amazon search box, as seen in Figure 1-5. Figure 1-5. Searching by ASIN Rather than displaying a list of search results for you to choose from, you'll be taken directly to the produc...

Most email programs wrap the text at 72 characters and end up breaking the URL, often making it unusable. Next time, instead of copying and pasting the URL exactly as you see it, try cropping it a bit so the lines won't wrap. Here's what a URL co...

Finding the URL is fairly easy in most browsers. In Internet Explorer on Windows, right-click the image and choose Properties. Once you have the image URL, you can bring it up in the browser by placing it in the address bar. Some browsers—Safari ...

Now that you know some of the secrets behind Amazon image URLs, you can make those images go away! Why in the world would anyone want to do that? Well, if you're one of those unfortunate souls who still use a modem to connect to the Web, eliminati...

"Amazon Anywhere" refers to Amazon's system of providing service to alternate devices. Amazon wants their service to be available to any device that connects to the Internet. Beyond the standard web interface written with HTML, they offer their si...

Once you know the browse node IDs for subject areas you're interested in, you can bypass the standard search forms and perform narrow, specialized searches from a URL. 8.1 Finding Browse Node IDs The first trick is finding the browse node ...

A couple of keywords can get you surprisingly close to what you're looking for. But if you'd like to do more sophisticated searches, you'll have to use the Advanced Search form or learn Amazon's Power Search syntax. 9.1 Advanced Search Ama...

This hack adds the ability to do Amazon searches from the same place. Instead of visiting the site, finding the search form, typing your query, and hitting the button, you can simply type amzn [search term] to get the same results. 10.1 Se...

Imagine this: you're reading an article on your favorite news web site about the latest tech trend: overclocking. It sounds like something you'd like to try, and you wonder if there are any books on the subject. You highlight the word, right-clic...

The Amazon Web Services API has opened up a direct door to Amazon's catalog. Developers can now search and browse Amazon programmatically, and reformat search results in any way they see fit. Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org) is an alternative ...