What this book covers
Chapter 1, Amazon Honeycode – Day 1, starts the book by enabling you to discover the power and value of Honeycode straight away with a to-do app that runs on both mobile and web browsers, built and deployed within 2 minutes by a few simple clicks on the UI. Being able to build and deploy your own app is the key value proposition of Honeycode.
Chapter 2, Introduction to Honeycode, provides the typical introduction to any new platform. It walks through Honeycode's layout and different sections and explains the various components and terminology used.
Chapter 3, Building Your First Honeycode Application, is a step-by-step guide to building the same to-do app as the first chapter, but from scratch and not using the template. While doing so, it applies the topics covered in Chapter 2, Introduction to Honeycode, and introduces the next set of details needed to build the app.
Chapter 4, Advanced Builder Tools in Honeycode, builds on the previous chapter, in which the to-do app we built was functional but, in all fairness, it was very basic and left much to be desired. But Honeycode offers a lot more tools for customization. In this chapter, we'll explore some of the advanced functionality that enables builders to improve the presentation with conditional styling, control the visibility of different components, add controls for filtering and sorting views, and even personalize the view for each user of the app.
Chapter 5, Powering the Honeycode Apps with Automations, focuses on the processing of user inputs from the app to add or change data, as well as indirect triggers such as time reached and changing certain values using automation.
Chapter 6, Introduction to Honeycode Templates, introduces you to templates, how they work, and the use cases that are currently enabled out of the box through these templates. Honeycode provides a diverse set of templates aimed at helping users to jump-start their journey. The chapter also provides a showcase of capabilities and use cases that can be built using Honeycode.
Chapter 7, Simple Survey Template, gets you started with setting up a simple survey out of the box.
Chapter 8, Instant Polls Template, gets you started with setting up polls out of the box.
Chapter 9, Event Management Template, gets you started with an out-of-the-box app for event management.
Chapter 10, Inventory Management Template, gets you started with an inventory management app out of the box.
Chapter 11, Building a Shopping List App in Honeycode, explains how to build an app for an everyday use case of maintaining an updated shopping list. The app we build will have the option to build lists for the different stores you may be purchasing from, move items from one list to another, and clear out items you've already bought. And finally, we have some exercises to further enhance the functionality.
Chapter 12, Building a Nominate and Vote App in Honeycode, asks you the question "have you ever found yourself searching for a tool/application that is not email or some word document or spreadsheet that lets you:
Run a contest where everyone can submit nominations and later vote for selecting a winner?
Decide by majority on the next movie to play on movie night or game(s) to play on games night?
Collect questions from an organization before an all-hands meeting, vote, and rank them to help pick the most-asked question?"
In this chapter, we'll build an app, using an existing template, that will enable you to answer these questions by adding functionality for running a contest.
Chapter 13, Conducting Periodic Business Reviews Using Honeycode, looks at the use case that most businesses have, where they hold periodic review meetings requiring collaboratively generated data and reports that are often shared and updated over email, requiring someone to collect all the threads and compile them for the final report.
In this chapter, we'll build an app that lets teams collaboratively work on a single source of truth and, therefore, always be able to see the latest information. We'll also make use of automation for sending reminders and generating a post-review email containing all the updates.
Chapter 14, Solving Complex Problems through Multiple Apps within a Workbook, explains that it is not always possible to solve a use case with a single app. Often, there are permissions, separate views, or even Honeycode limitations that require us to make use of multiple apps within the same workbook. In this chapter, we take the example of a realtor managing their buying and selling clients and servicing them to showcase the power of Honeycode in allowing multiple apps to provide different customized data views based on the user type.
To get the most out of this book
You'll need to have access to Amazon Honeycode, which requires a laptop with a web browser, preferably Google Chrome, and optionally a mobile device running either a Honeycode-supported version of Android (currently requires Android 8.0 and up) or iOS (currently requires iOS 11 or later). No programming knowledge or experience is expected to start creating basic apps. However, working knowledge of Microsoft Excel or similar spreadsheet tools and a general understanding of logical statements are helpful to get the most out of this book.
If you have questions, new ideas to discuss, or require help or consultation on your Honeycode projects, come and join this LinkedIn group: Honeycode builders | Groups | LinkedIn.
