Customer Reviews

Understanding Enterprise SOA

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This is the first time I have created a review but I felt compelled to offset the 1 person out of 12 who gave this book a bad rating. I can't imagine a better more concise inrtroduction to this subject. I can't understand what would motivate somone to give this book a bad review. The title of the book is UNDERSTANDING Enterprise SOA not EXPERT'S guide to Enterprise SOA and it is so well written with such great diagrams that even a non-IT person could understand the material. The examples ARE real and in fact almost EXACTLY mirror the environment of my current company - in fact it will serve as a valuable road map going forward.

If you want to understand this stuff and not get lost in all the vendor self serving hype GET THIS BOOK PERIOD!

I have bought every book on SOA available. The best book I have found is Thomas Erl's Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology and Design. However this book provides a good hands on with examples. I especially liked the section on SOA Networking and SOA Networks.

Gary E Smith
SOA Networks

Understanding Enterprise SOA is a book of choice; it uncovers the reality fact that SOA is the emergent wave of current technology. Through real case studies from the industry, the book holds a simple way of presenting the core of the enterprise SOA trend to the business people and the IT professionals, showing how much changes will be there crossing the fields of B2B, Business process management, real-time operations, and enterprise software development in general. The book goes on two tracks to achieve its goal of realizing enterprise SOA; Technology and People. Chapter 4 introduces the concept of SOA in an easy way, on the other track (part 2) chapter 14 introduce a (Four P's), which is a suggested process of a four stages for the best practices in enterprise SOA. This book has really put some focused lights across the SOA area.

Writing a book on SOA is going to be extremely difficult when you have to take care that you do not get into the mold of FUD. But this book has taken the approach of providing a practical aspect of adopting SOA in enterprises.

In the introduction, there is a good case study about integrating processes in two merging insurance companies. This is a great start to this book rather than throwing in some definitions or jargon.

Part 1:
Chapter 1 talks on loose coupling, the foundation of SOA. The chapter works on using SOA to the case study discussed in the introduction. I like that the authors describe distributed systems and tight coupling before delving into benefits of loose coupling.

Part 2:
This unit of chapters is all about the people in the two insurance companies that need to be appraised of SOA. This section talks about establishing best practices and then draw out a SOA plan before implementation.

Overall the tone of the book is to provide a real life feeling to the reader. Lot of imagination and prior experience in enterprises will help the reader get the message of the authors.

A good book to add to the SOA library.

Just about every technology cliché' out there is used in the "used-car-salesman's" version of a book on SOA (sorry if I offend any used car salesman here). The argument here is that SOA solves every ill. Not true. Only good, sound, application of the proper technology where it is needed will do that, not SOA alone. These guys could have written a great book if they had only refrained from hyperbole.

I'm amazed this book received so many good reviews, the only reason I can see is that the reviewers are all Managers or it's a sign of a skewed process.

Anyway the books own description should give it away "Intended for both business people and technologists". What are the chances of that being true? I'd say none.

Basically this is a Managers book with all the consultant doublespeak you'd expect. It's written from such a high level it will give you nose bleed and makes tons of assumptions that only a Manager would buy into. If you are a techie and buy this book you will waste your time at best and learn misleading/incorrect info at worse.

Understanding Enterprise SOA is well written and very informative. Using the example company and all the other examples and illustrations makes this a refreshing read.

This book is written for idiots by idiots. The pampering tone and the simplistic examples, that are neither valid nor enlightening, makes me wanna puke....

SOA solves everything, if we just disregard complexity and security. Oh, and yes, EAI is bad for you (and wildly different from a SOAP/WSDL ....). Sigh. Even I can produce better trash than this. As a technocrat, it gives me nothing. As a manager, it is full of techno-babble, with examples that doesn't fit business reality and so simplistic solutions, that if a CIO proposed them, he would get thrown out.

And painfully boring written as well. Nearest trashbin is too kind a fate for this piece of trash.

I am a J2EE developer working in a telco company.
I was looking for a good introductory book to SOA.
Browsing amazon web pages i found "Enterprise SOA" book. Comments are good it is published from manning and it has only 280 pages.

I wish i would not bought it.
Contents are too high level, it is very repetitive and too verbose.
Authors use verbose scenarios even to describe very easy concepts forcing you to read about 25 lines for something that someone else would have explained with 5 lines.
Very detailed diagrams promise interesting contents but they are only there to support banal concepts.

The book says it's targeted "for both business people and technologists"
I'm afraid it's only for business people who don't want to be bothered with IT medium-level details.

I suggest developers to skip this book and go for something else.

I have read a quite a few books on the topic, as I'm exploring next generation enterprise information systems for my employer. This book offered me some good insight as to how an SOA can be applied to my business. The book also offers a concise history of the technologies that lead to SOA, and offers some well written case study analysis. I would recommend the book to anyone who wants a solid overview of the space from people who clearly know what they are talking about.