Customer Reviews

Web Services

5 star:		(5)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is a little more expensive than most of the flashy Web Services books these days but it is well worth the money. Set in small font and not wasting pages on chapters like "History of XML and SOAP" this book is dense in content on the architecture of distributed systems, including Web Services. We get to learn about the issues of distributed transactions and the differences between conversations, coordination and orchestration. The text is precise but nevertheless easy to follow. One of the best books I have seen on Web Services architecture.

You can find a sample chapter on the author's site:
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/alonso/Web-book/Chapter-5.pdf

I am using this book for a graduate level class about Web Services. I like the books approach on giving you enough background about middle-ware evolution that makes it easier to understand what Web Services are trying to accomplish. Given that the actual technology (implementation details) change so much in this area the books approach makes a lot of sense. I also found explanations to be concise and clear.

Advice: if you are looking for a hands-on how-to book about XML this is not the book to pick up. Otherwise, if you are looking for a good fundamentals book that will help you paint a big picture of Web Services this book is great!

The quality of the Kindle version of this book is very poor. It looks as if one is reading a poor quality scan rather than rendered text. The type face is very light and jagged. Worse still, are the whitespace breaks between letters within words. It's like reading code rather than prose. Unfortunately, I didn't start reading the book until well after the seven day return policy and now I'm stuck with it but, don't you get stuck with it. If you want this book, get the hard copy and avoid the Kindle version at all cost.

If you want comprehensive high level overview of today's enterprise software landscape, this is a must-read.

One of the best books which answers the question , Why Web Services?? Unique perspective on middlewares in general.

Do not expect any code examples or details of any particular middleware.

A very nice introductory book on Web services, much different from all the others on this topic.
Excellent overview of the problematics of service oriented architectures on the Web and of their relationships with their EAI counterparts (corba,rpc,..).

First part of the book while describing Distributed Systems, Middleware and EAI lays strong foundation for Web Services. Second part of the book provides an extensive reporting about Web Services Architecture, related standards, service composition and BPEL. Though at the outset this book looks like serving academic purpose but it also provides the great insight of the subject to the programming community.

This book is must have which draws detailed conceptual and architectural views on Distributed Systems, EAI and Web Services.