Customer Reviews

Professional BizTalk (Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read this book as soon as it was published. Didn't cross my mind to review it until I read the other reviews.

Let's face it -- there isn't a lot of material available on this topic. At least one of the co-authors is from MS. In order to get anything out of this book after chapter 5, though, you must take the time to work through their examples (which can be tedious and wordy) and do the exercises (which have mistakes and skip steps). You also must accept that BizTalk is a big product that you have to work with a long time to get the big picture -- and then once you get the big picture, you have to work out the little details. That's what this book does.

If you are looking for a simple how-to guide, or a quick read, run away. If you are looking for a book that will guide you through a path of BizTalk self-discovery AND you are willing to put out a rather hefty effort, this book will reward you in the end.

This book is very informative, and complete on most core and advanced features offered by Biztalk. The sample codes work, and provide a very good guide to start on your own.

The contents may not be very well organized, that's the only weakness I can think of. but, you really want this book for its information.

By the way, currently that's the only Biztalk book that cover Orchestration.

This book is much better than the Microsoft documentation, but that isn't saying much. The book seems to have the information I need, but the authors don't seem to understand I do not wish to read hundreds of pages in order to obtain that information. The book is written like a novel: in order to understand any one chapter, you must read all preceeding chapters. Much of the book is overly verbose. I would have preferred the book be written more in a reference and task oriented style. Still, given the options (or lack thereof), you better get this book.

Finally, Wrox's complete BizTalk book. As complete as the product itself, nothing less! This book will take you, as either a developer or an administrator (or both!), through all facets that makes a successfull BizTalk Server installation.

As with previous Stephen book, this one takes a case-study through most of the book and complement it with the new features or the chapter. You will learn to leverage each of those functionality in order to achieve our case-study project. Also usual, this book contains a lot of very technical knowledge, knowledge found deeply inside the BizTalk server with a big touch of experience, all given to the readers in this book!

This book has lots of useful technical information and the authors know their subject well. The book however, isn't well suited for those of us who like learning by hands-on examples and/or appreciate the quick start approach. Though Biztalk is a messaging product, I'm on chapter 5, page 256, and the authors haven't yet used an example that has sent a single message. So far the book is based on one main example that attemps to cover too many points. Unfortunately the example has typos and doesn't compile - even using the downloaded code. It would be much more effective to start with a couple of "Hello World" like examples to quickly illustrate the product functionality.

This book has good content and would be worthy of 5 stars if it were not so wordy. I found myself reading the same thing over and over on different pages just worded different. Its like the authors were told they needed 600 pages so they made long sentences and repeated themselves over and over again. However after you filter out the nonsense the book does cover Biztalk very well. Therefore I would still recommend purchasing it. The authors know there stuff and it helped me on my project big time.

This is a an excellent primer/reference on Biztalk Server 2000 for developers new/old to B2B and EAI. The examples they use in the book are consistent and realistic; the explanations clear and thorough.

One of the things I liked the most about this book is that the authors were not afraid to pop the hood open and show you the gory guts of the engine inside (i.e. their section on writing your own functoids is very cool, as well as routing, custom parsing and serializing).

If you already know Biztalk and have worked with it since it was in beta (like I have), you'll still find lots of valuable nuggets of information and "here's why they did it this way" explanations.

enjoy it, I sure did.

-jason chahin, co-author "COM/DCOM Unleashed"

The authors do the best they can working from Microsoft's grossly inadequate product documentation. BizTalk is a complicated product, and yet Microsoft has made very little information available about how it actually works. This book reflects that: the authors seem well-versed on accomplishing specific programming tasks, but they impart very little knowledge of BizTalk internals or architecture.

The examples are good and the coverage of the material is comprehensive. However, the text is rather long-winded, and at times material could be expressed much more succinctly. Also, I would have liked to have seen more "how-to" examples as opposed to long-running sample applications that span multiple chapters.

As usual, though, Wrox outclasses the other technical publishers with the best book yet on BizTalk.

I started witht his book witha lot of interest. But reading this was really a frustrating thing. It certainly failed in putting pieces together. There is more unnecessary talk in this book than useful content. If you are serious about learning BizTalk, This is not the book for you. Go somewhere else.

The book gives a good introduction to BizTalk and the technology involved. But it is a bit too descriptive and not suited for people like me who would want to get our hands dirty by coding. The book also does not deal much with C# and how to use C# to customize the mapper, etc.