SOA Design Fundementals in multiple levels
It's a practical guide on defining service characteristics and design principles in multiple levels, from component implementation to application design to enterprise architecture. Very digestive material.
Best Web Service Tutorial I have ever seen
This book is really useful specially for a person who want to learn the basic of web service and then go deep for XML and Web Service usage in Service Oriented domain.
Excellent roadmap
Thomas Erl covers SOA perfectly. The ebb and flow of the book is excellent. He does not cover proprietary technologies, and rightfully so. However, he explains the W3 standards of XML, SOAP, Web services and many key service models. He also is aware of corporate culture and thinking realistically as you take on a SOA implementation. This book has made me a better software developer. Keep things autonomous and keep things abstract.
Advertising for Author's Business
I read this book as part of a technical book club at work. The concensus of the group is that there is very little useful information in it. It contains many diagrams and charts that provide little benefit other than to increase the page count. It contains mis-information concerning competing technologies such as CORBA and constantly treats SOA and Web Services as if they are interchangeable terms. Much of the information is superficial. The bright spot in the book was that the large number of nearly identical charts made reading the chapters go very quickly. Finally, the author often seems to be using the book as advertisment for his company. There are much better resources for gaining an understanding of SOA and Web Services. Don't waste you money on this one.
Waste of verbatim
The entire book can be summed up on 3 to 4 pages. Mostly the book regurgitates the same concepts over and over to fill up the pages, using a plethora of technical terminology to abstract it's own meaningless. For the most part the book is intended to give you an overview of verity of technologies encapsulated in SOA architecture, but from a very distant perspective.