Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
SMOOTH-SAILING INFO-BOOK: FOR BEGINNERS, March 26, 2003
"Microsoft .NET XML Web Services Step-by-Step" is a straightforward text, which beginners and intermediates should enjoy learning from. Everything about this book (including its .NET Components coverage) is simplified. Anybody who has a vague understanding of XML and WSDL can cope comfortably with it. It is that reader-friendly!
The book offered flexible presentations on the correlations of XML and .NET programming. In fact, its primary objective is to enable readers understand the interdependence, which exist between the two technologies.
This is a fine, smooth-sailing, info-book; only that it has very little to offer non-beginners. Advanced learners need not waste money on it.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent tutorial for beginners., September 30, 2005
I am half way through the book and I like it. It is a good tutorial that will hold your hand and help you taking your first steps on the planet WebServices. The authors selected an interesting and practical example subject, validating credit card numbers, so you will not need a lot of coffee to keep you awake.
The examples are so simple, so if you are an experienced OO programmer, keep in mind that the goal was introducing the subject not implementing the code in the most elegant way.
On the other hand, the authors followed a naming convention from hell. I am not just talking about casing but also the logical selection of class names. For example, In chapter 6 the authors were explaining the subject of sending objects and returning objects from/to web service. So they built a class and named it "ValidationObject". I don't want to sound like an OO lawyer here but the class is not an object; Objects are instances of the class.
Anyway, I guess a name like "CreditCard" would've made much more sense, after all it is a credit card we are passing around. Variables were named like this x_object, o_card_type.
Personally, I couldn't continue without building a names map. I just recorded each name and to which object it was given on a piece of paper.
A word of advice; this is not the type of book you want to come back for a second read hoping that it will give you more understanding of the subject. So make sure you will take notes and summarize the important facts of each chapter.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good Overview But Becoming Dated, May 16, 2008
This book was a fantastic overview of how XML Web Services are encapsulated by the .NET platform and the services provided by the numerous APIs. It offers step-by-step examples that lead you through the various facets of producing and consuming Web Services. It does not delve too deeply into many of the services provided by .NET for bettor or worse.
Four years ago I would have rated this book a 4 star or higher, however, the examples are based upon legacy .NET 1.1 and Visual Studio 2003. Like myself, I would presume that the majority of developers are at least working with .NET 2.0 and VS 2005 now. In addition the current release of both is at 3.5 and 2008 respectively.
The core material of the book is still very much relevant. The examples for how to configure IIS, setup and copy web projects, and manipulate code in the IDE have changed significantly between product releases though. I didn't mind that much because it forced me to have to figure out how to apply the same task in the newer environment. For me that was OK, but beginners may be frustrated by that.
A few notes on the content and examples:
1. In the code exercises, I found that it would have been much more helpful to put the steps for importing classes (C# using / VB import statements) at the beginning of the code exercises instead of at the end so the person typing in the code could better make use of Visual Studio's Intellisense feature.
2. There was a lot of rote copy / retyping the same material from chapter to chapter. The author tried to minimize with copy instructions in each chapter. I felt as though the examples could have been modularized and reused better.
3. The Microsoft UDDI site that chapter 9 discusses no longer functions as described in the text. I skipped it completely.
4. Chapter 15 about consuming Web Services asynchronously was the one that probably had the most version differences between .NET 1.1 and 2.0. The way that callbacks are handled changed dramatically. This was once again a good learning experience for me to figure out how to make it work in 2.0
5. Code examples were generally good, however, the authors coding style for variable names was not all that intuitive. Maybe a short mention of naming convention would have been nice (e.g. what the 'p_' and 'x_' prefixes meant)
Overall, it is a good book and I would recommend it highly if you are still developing on .NET 1.1 / VS 2003, but less so if not. Hopefully, the authors will publish a newer edition sometime soon.
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