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42 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
If you want correct details, Don't Waste Your Money!, December 11, 2009
The reviewers of this book who rave about the details in this book certainly did not try to execute any of the example code. If they had, they would know that these are errors all the way through the book in the code examples.
The errors are not trival if you are trying to learn by focusing on what exactly the code is doing. In one example in the first chapter, there is a whole class left out of the source code, nor does the book mention it in the text.
Go to the errata section on the publishers website, the list of errors is long. The error I mention above is not in the errata either.
How does a book like this get out to the store shelves without proper editing?
If this is the best the author can do, please don't screw over the readers that are making their best efforts to get it right. If you would rather write a conceptual book, that's fine, just leave the details out.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Java WS book written by a C/C++ veteran?, October 8, 2009
The author appears to be a C/C++ veteran instead of a Java guru. Method names such as read_teams_from_file and variable names such as team_map are everywhere.
The author also appears to ignore other common industry practice or industry norm. E.g. in the RestfulTeams service (page 137), information about the new team to create is contained in the HTTP header rather than in the body of the HTTP request to demonstrate "the flexibility of REST-style services".
While it is interesting to show it is possible to develop a Dispatch client against a SOAP based service with HTTP_BINDING (page 158), the author does not even mention the better, easier and more concise alternative, i.e., to use the default SOAP_BINDING for the Dispatch client.
Section 5.3.2 HTTP BASIC Authentication (page 212) is another example of abusing a well defined and well understood IT industry terminology, while the true HTTP BASIC Authentication (on Tomcat) is covered under another section (page 219, Container-Managed Authentication and Authorization) without explicitly lableing it as such.
Overall, the first 120 pages is a good introduction to JAX-WS 2.1. The rest of the book appears to be filler from various lecture notes.
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31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Weak Chapter on REST, June 3, 2009
I bought this book primarily to read about writing RESTful Web Services with JAX-RS which is one of the two topics mentioned in the product description.
I must say I am really disappointed with the coverage of this topic. Not many pages are devoted to it, and there are also some flaws in the presentation of REST and in the examples. For example when describing HTTP GET, the author equals "side-effect-free" with "idempotent", which is wrong. The Representations (the XML-formats) are strange, for GET they are serialized Java-objects without any semantics, for POST they are XMLs with the verb <create_team> as the root-tag.
The presentation of JAX-RS (Jersey) is only 4 pages, and far from what I need to do something useful.
As for the rest of the book I don't know, so the rating is based on the presentation of REST and JAX-RS.
I bought this book together with the "Java SOA Cookbook" by Eben Hewitt, and I also have read "RESTful Web Services" by Leonard Richardson. The chapter on REST and JAX-RS in the "Java SOA Cookbook" if faaar better, and "RESTful Web Services" is a good general introduction to REST.
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