Customer Reviews

Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation

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

 

 

You know one thing that annoys me, buying a book that other people have rated '5 stars' only to find out that it is clearly not a 5-star book. Boy is this book not a 5-star book. After reading this book front to back in 4-5 days and learning a tiny tiny fraction of what I needed to actually implement WCF within an enterprise I decided to print out the documentation that comes with the Windows SDK and read that. Now I really know what it takes to implement WCF. I agree with other reviewers that have suggested that this book is light on content and heavy on fluffy filler. This book glosses so lightly over so many topics it's ludicrous. If you're desperate I'd suggest finding a white paper that covers the WCF concepts and architecture, then reading the Windows SDK documentation for WCF - you'll save $100NZD.

This book was poorly edited. After reading nearly every paragraph, I just want to rewrite it for readability. The book makes easy concepts difficult due to the writing style of the author. A sample sentence: "WCF provides you with a number of settings to implement fairly sophisticated means of applying network congestion detection,timeout intervals,retry counts,ordering,and so on." Lets see.. what? "...settings to implement sophisticated means of applying..."? This is a really simple idea that the author has butchered with his delivery. Another complaint: glossing over an idea, and then saying "It really is pretty much as simple as that." Well, which one? "really is" or "pretty much"? It can't be both. Just a case in point - this book went through no editing whatsoever.

I purchased the book and looked it throught... Before ordering this book I read several articles on the net related to how to make basic steps in WCF and found, that WCF is easy ti understand.
I found almost nothing new to me in this book. I also noticed, that book structure looks a little bit following the structure of MSDN .NET Framework 3.0 WCFreference. Almost the same topics... Almost the same explanations...
Actually, no topic seemed to me covered completely in it. Just the common principles on how to work with WCF.

For example, speaking of Request-Response Contract types authors seem forgot to mention, that even if you write a void method without returning any value, WCF will create special empty value and use it as void method signature to wait from server.
Duplex contracts are reviewed in terms of P2P environment on unknown reason. Many questions are unanswered on this topic.
Versioning of Data Contracts is poorly reviewed.

The only question remained in my mind after reading this book is: is WCF really so easy to understand, or just the book and MSDN references are incomplete? :)

Unfortunately this is a poor book, and if you are a busy person I would recommend you find something else, something that is well organised instead.

This book had poor organisation, lots of grammatical errors, and a ton of verbose blather with not much meaty info, and badly failed my signal to noise ratio test.
It would be possible to strip two thirds of the words out by reformatting concisely, as well taking out all the times the authors say 'as we are showing you'. I would certainly have appreciated it much more if they had been concise, as my time is precious.

I purchased this book along with charles petzolds 'Application = Code + Markup" and 'Essential WF', and both are excellent books. They are the standard I expect from 'professional' programming books, particularly ones with Pro in the title! They had a concise and structured presentation, good editiorial proofing and grammar, and gave me insight I could not easily get from MSDN.

To the authors: sorry to give your book a bad rap, but it's true and you can produce better work, I'm sure of it. Also, you should get a good editor, who will catch grammatical errors, and stop you being self indulgent and bring your focus back to what the readers want, which is not to hear you say hundreds of time 'as we are showing you'!

I must say that this book is not up to the standard I've come to expect from recent APress titles on .NET. I'd love to give you details, but the simple fact is that I haven't found it to be of much use as a reference.

While it could be a little better, I recommend Programming WCF Services (Programming) instead. It serves well as a reference and a reader.

Let me just say that after I have went through this book I had to order another one.
It explains the theory (however not clearly enough in some cases). I am a developer and I need to pick up the WCF quickly.
This book misses developer oriented approach. Too few examples.
I put one star, as basically I wasted my money and had to buy another one.

very light on details. Like a previous reviewer I read the book cover-to-cover hoping to get the information required to implement serious WCF solutions, but found that much of the content is light on details, the examples are trivial or don't work, and the book leaves out much necessary detail. The other reviewer commenting on the editing of the text is also correct, the editing leaves much to be desired. Some passages are so poorly written as to make them unintelligible.

I typically enjoy the APRESS books, but in this case I have to recommend that anyone interested in WCF find a different book.

I read the first 2 chapters and already fed up. The 2 biggest problem is no examples for the new term/notion brought in, and text piled up for text.

This book gives you not just pure WCF/.NET coverage,but covers interop scenarios. I think some of the reviewers come from different backgrounds or disciplines. This is not for all; you have to stomach some verbosity, but the things work. Code is descriptive and gives you the "why" as well.

I got this book, because I had learned WF from another book in the series which I thought was exceptional. This book has lots of examples, and it will be an excellent reference once I am done reading it the first time.

The language isn't as clear as the WF book, and there is an extensive use of "buzz words" to describe the advantages of SOA development in the early chapters that don't really give you a sense that you're learning anything.

In the end however, they manage to give a very concise, comprehensible rundown on what is a pretty complex subject. I would recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn WCF.