Not a good book for most users.
I have intermeidate experience with BizTalk, and many of the examples in this book are not fully explained, nor is there adequate sample code to review.
Also, on the publisher's site, there is not book code page to be found. Apparently there was once a page but the link has been broken for several weeks. I presume that so many people had questions that the author stopped supporting the book. I woulds stay away from this one.
Good how-to reference, BAM and BRE can be addressed more
Though this book covers basics, it is a good reference book to learn what some of the real world scenarios are and how to solve them.
However, if you assume this a 1-2-3 type "recipes", you may find challenges in following the instructions. To name a few, just try out Recipe 5-2 from the Sample Chapter of this book, I wonder how many people can get it working. You will also need good enough of background to jump right into some topics such as BRE and BAM, or you will be left with a lot of "Why" and "How" while reading some talk-through descriptions (Yes, you are reading right, not step 1-2-3 at all). "Related Activities" in Recipe 9-1 is one of many examples.
You may be questioning yourself and try to look for sample codes/project download from the publisher Apress official site. You will be very disappointed how many key subjects out there. This may be the nature of the BizTalk implementation, unlike other subjects such as C# coding sample which author can just zip and ship the sample codes out for download.
Overall, this book is fine. To me, it seems this book came out rush. More proof-reading can make this book better.
Well balanced, provides insight in how things work
BizTalk 2006 Recipes is a refreshing book. Rather than re-organize the existing help, they have taken the time to address dozens and dozens of common scenarios and provided "recipes" for each of these.
This is information that you don't find in the help. Just like a cookbook, appetizers, breads, drinks, poultry, salads, etc., BizTalk 2006 Recipes uses the same paradigm, Schemas, Mapping, Messaging, Orchestrations, etc. For each "recipe," you have the problem you are trying to solve, the solution for the problem, and then best part, "How it Works," which explains the underpinnings of each of the topics. They pick both simple and advanced topics and it is structured to allow you to either go through the book end-to-end or to use it as a reference. I think this is a great compliment to the existing documentation and a handy reference for any BizTalk developer.
Good, but not complete
I find that the examples given in this book cover the basics well. There is nothing about the EDI subsystem or the Sharepoint Adapter.
Great for reference, great for learning BizTalk
This is a piece of the review I wrote on my blog (putting the URL would be against the policies here so I'm leaving it out).
The book format: It is a recipe book so is written in a "Problem, Solution, How it works" style format with each chapter being given an introductory page or two preface. This book will be a great one to have around as a reference book, but I have to say that I also enjoyed reading it cover to cover (well almost... honestly I skimmed chapter 10, this chapter probably could have been done away with and the contents moved to other chapters).
The book is fairly comprehensive in covering BizTalk soup to nuts; there is a chapter on Schemas, one on Business Rules engine (more on this one later in the post), one on BAM and one talking about HAT. The writing styles of the various authors were not too apparent, but rather fairly subtle; sometimes in code samples they were apparent however; one chapter has code that uses both hungarian notation on variables, but also on function parameters. That should be done away with in this persnickety developers opinion. I have to say that from still fairly green knowledge of BizTalk, it appears that at least some of the authors have implemented a fair amount of BT solutions in their careers; to me this was evidenced by the "NOTE" sections that were lusciously littered throughout the text that included well thought out pitfulls and other tips to assist in your BizTalk solutions. In my opinion the one chapter that stuck out (and obviously I could be wrong) as one that wasn't written from experience but rather written from a "I just learned this" kind of perspective was the business rules engine chapter 5 (which ironically is available for free download from Apress).
Overall, I would give this book 3 tivo thumbs up, 4.5 stars out of 5 rating. Get this book if you need assistance with BizTalk 2006.
Other side notes, the authors created a blog site just for the book, but thus far only posted one comment and apparently aren't interested in doing much blogging, I'd love to see that change.
One other note I forgot to include; there was a couple spots that made reference to BizTalk 2004; one of the spots was more of a "if you are used to doing it this way, here is what you will have to do now" kind of reference; I found that appropriate; the other one was "here is how to do it in 2004 and here is how to do it in 2006". That one the book could do without. I don't recall where in the book they were; but for the authors knowledge it was the first 2004 reference in the book that could go and the 2nd one could stay :) I gave them the full 5 stars since they are first to market; I think 4.5 stars would be an appropriate rating on this book. Great job to the authors!
