Customer Reviews

Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Too many "SOA" books are either API documents or high-level hand waving. You can tell that this book is based on actual project experience. The authors manage to give actionable guidance and explain their reasoning well without diving into too many technology details. If you are interested in the "A" of "SOA", you will like this book.

One of the previous reviewers said " I could get everything I needed from a few beers with a few Technicians". As a consultant, he demonstrated his focus was strictly a technologist and not someone with any responsibility to develop a working plan, and explain it to the owners of the business.

This book is invaluable to business architects, systems design architects, and others who have to discuss complex challanges and develop working business plans for technology without endangering their company by going down a Rat Hole of technology for technologists. For that alone, the book is worth 10 times it's price.

No, it is not a "Geek Book". IT is a real world IT manager and IT architect book as a guideline. And the business planning and business culture changes that SOA affects are clearly outlined in this text in a way that even a novice can understand.

And what is who will really find this book valuable. Not self styled experts on coding and Coding practices, but business and IT professionals who have to work in the large scale enterprises of today.

Excellent book
JJM

There are a number of books on service oriented architecture. Most concentrate on the technical side of the equation. Talking about the standards, the APIs, the cross-platform issues and other low level issues. This book takes an architectural route by covering every aspect of the SOA space with well written exposition and extensive use of UML.

One section, which I haven't seen in any other book on the topic, is on the managerial issues around SOA. How to tell SOA in the organization. How to build support the architecture. How to incent the engineers. These are important topics. And what's better is that the author illustrates the management level problems and their proposed solutions with real world cases studies.

An excellent book on SOA for readers looking for an architectural overview.

Frankly, I thought SOA was just a bunch of marketing hype until I read this book. The authors begin by clearly explaining of the kinds of problems SOA is trying to solve, and how other architectures tried and failed (or partially succeeded) to solve these problems. In fact, you don't get a definition of SOA until chapter 4, which is a good thing. The advice and strategies are well-reasoned and practical. The organizational roadmap seems to be unique among SOA books, and is clearly derived from experience. The case studies highlight the kinds of tradeoffs each organization had to deal with, along with lessons learned. Finally, I found this book to be very readable and interesting.

This is a great introduction to SOA. The authors focus on the fundamentals of SOA, displaying both wisdom and honesty as they discuss the structure of an SOA, its essential and optional elements, strategies for SOA introduction (from technical and organizational points of view), SOA oriented project management techniques, success (and failure stories), etc.

The book is refreshing in the way that it avoids the vendor induced hysteria associated with new technologies choosing instead to calmly and objectively discuss the fundamental forces driving SOA adoption: federation, heterogeneity, agility, reuse.

Additionally, the authors display a healthy dose of independence as they discuss the merits and lack thereof of over-hyped technologies such as Enterprise Service Buses and BEPL systems. This is clearly a book written by people who have actually built SOAs, as opposed to sit on WS-* committees or implement SOA related junkware.

A lot of books about IT concepts just touch on technology. This book goes at least one step further. It does not only explain, what a SOA is and how you should/could implement a SOA, it also gives real world advice how to introduce it to and deploy it in large enterprises. A step which is often negelected and underestimated. Good reading.

This is the first book on SOA i came across that provides deep and very helpful insights in architectural, organizational and management aspects as well as concise hands-on guidelines to handle most common problems regarding a SOA implementation without digging deep into soon-to-be-outdated matters as current technology and programming language issues.

It is a valuable source for everyone interested in SOA, from software developers looking for a starting point into this matter or looking for the big picture, to project managers in search for advice how to cope with challenges SOA puts on software development projects
--- and it is based on the authors practical experience from many large scale projects, illustrating given guidelines with real world case studies.

Definitely worth reading.

The authors have done an outstanding job providing useful coverage of SOA best practices. This book is written from the perspective of an architect or manager who wants to prevent unnecessary pain in the process of converting existing IT infrastructures to SOA. Converting to SOA, as the authors observe, is an evolutionary process that affects the whole enterprise. The authors provide timely, comprehensive and well-researched insight into the elements for success from the technical, process, management and political perspectives. The book provides useful coverage of specific technologies without becoming a document of source code listings. The book also provides four brief case studies of successful SOA, which is very helpful. The book is well written, with exceptional UML diagrams, typesetting and sidebars for clear communication. The best overall SOA book on the market at present.

This book covers SOA not only from a technical point of view but also from organizational aspects and impacts.. This book is uniuqe in two ways: 1) It covers non-technology and business related aspects of SOA, and 2) it is based on author's experience with several SOA projects. It is not like many other books on SOA that includes only technology, products, and protocols; but beyond that this book places SOA in context of of Enterprise Renovation in which SOA's technical foundations are detailed in an honest way without promoting any technology or product. In short, it is an excellent book!

This book is split into 3 logical sections: architectural concepts, organizational aspects and real world case studies. Every other book on SOA I have seen completely ignores those last two areas while in the concepts section they often tend to freely mix architectural with implementation issues - usually equating SOA to Web Services. The authors of this book clearly understand that the technologies and standards employed to implement an SOA are clearly independent of the general underlying architectural principles. As such, you get a good crisp discussion of SOA issues such as data integrity, granularity etc. without getting caught up in the limitations and language of specific standards. That said, I do hope they release a second revision of this book that discusses how these architectural principles can be realized with specific standards. Around the area of metadata and policy for example it is true that the standards are indeed pushing the boundaries of what an SOA can and should do. Of course this would add another 150+ pages to the book but would be very worthwhile. In summary, this is very much a book about best practices for SOA today based on a wealth of hands on experience and as such I would absolutely recommend it as the first book to read on the subject.