Clear, concise starting with the business
This book clearly explains the concepts and principles of SOA and makes the vital link to Enterprise Architecture. I would highly recommend this book to start with. If you then need more detail on for instance SOA Design Principles or SOA Design Patterns read Thomas Erl's series.
Outstanding - worth the read.
I have not seen a SOA book that is as practical as this one. Most of the people I work with understand why SOA is important, and we all get the vision by now. Many of the other popular SOA books ONLY focus on the vision and "what is SOA?" but not much else.
This book is different. It provides details. It focuses on architecture, design, and provides in-depth guidance for a wide variety of problem areas that we all encounter when we build SOA implementations. The book is a long one, but it is worth the read.
From Web Services to SOA
I found this book valuable for providing a solid approach to designing service oriented architectures. It is important for people to understand that this book does not focus on implementing web services - there are plenty of other books that do that. This book focuses on the hard parts - how to design an architecture around the concept of services.
This book is also not a "cookbook" - it does not offer easy answers to these tough problems. Instead it walks you through the thought process so you can learn how to come up with the right answers yourself.
I am actively using this book to help my customers get started with SOA and to help them avoid common design pitfalls. My favorite chapter is Chapter 9: Using Services to Build Enterprise Solutions. The distinction between today's monolothic applications and tomorrow's composite applications requires a paradigm shift that the authors express well.
Finally, I especially liked the practical approach, practical steps and practical advice continually peppered throughout the entire book.
Practical and Comprehensive
I just recently read through Applied SOA, and I found it to be one of the most practical and comprehensive SOA books out there. What I thought was especially helpful were all of the examples - specifically some of stories of where SOA implementations have gone wrong, how they were corrected, and how to avoid traps. I especially appreciated the in-depth case studies at the end of the book. I haven't seen many books that offer such a practical approach, and that is why this book stands out.
I thought that Part 1 of the book is good for those new to SOA, and I found that the rest of the book provides great guidance and detail for more seasoned architects. I liked the chapters on "Using Services to Build Enterprise Solutions" and "Designing and Using Integration in SOA Solutions", as they provided much detail. I have to disagree about an earlier review on this site - I found the chapters on SOA Security and SOA Governance to be incredibly well-done. I thought that the SOA security chapter was comprehensive in laying out different security blueprints, and I felt that the governance chapter focused on governance in a technology and vendor-neutral way, which is rare to find these days..
If I were to make one complaint, it would be that the book is very large. It is not a quick read, but it is a comprehensive guide to SOA and it is practical. I highly recommend it.
Too little too late
This book added very little to my current understanding of SOA. In fact I am not really sure what it contributes to the design strategies of SOA, and it is kind of too late to introduce SOA in year 2008 -> about almost 8 years after its inception. To learn about SOA basics I suggeet to get the SOA for Dummies book that does a better job on explaining SOA. Also the chapters about SOA security and SOA governance are poor and again do not add to the current industry discussion of SOA. I do not recommend it to mid or expert level SOA persons. But even people that starting with SOA will find it poor to begin with. It is too late too little. I like the case studies in the end of the book and again I am not sure why these cases are for insurance companies. Is this book for the insurence industry only?
