Refreshingly Honest
This book is definetely one of the better SOAP books around, particularly if you're looking for something that stays focussed and presents a balanced view of the technology. In fact, as you read this book, the author's numerous caveats about shifting standards, incompatabilities, performance and security problems, etc. might make you wonder why you started down the SOAP road in the first place. Here's a few other things I noticed:1. Possibly contains the largest number of URL references of any computer book I've read (links to specifications, third party tools, etc.) including a whole appendix on SOAP tools.
2. Does NOT contain much code at all, which is OK for me, but if you want it, the author provides it for free on his web site. (This keeps the book relatively thin, which I truly appreciate!). What code there is is fairly Microsoft (and VB in particular) oriented, though, there are few .NET references.
3. Focussed and avoids a lot of repetition from other books re: related technologies such as XML, SAX/DOM, etc.
A good mix of theory and practical advice and above all, a much more honest and balanced (eg. relatively hype-free) view of the world than is typical.
An excellence resource for SOAP
I had to get SOAP up and running between a Java client and a Microsoft IIS web server within three weeks, and this book has provide most of the information I needed to accomplish the project. It has an excellence flow, and provides very useful examples. It also has many links to websites that have additional details for specific topics. I highly recommend it for anyone who are interesting in SOAP. However, it is important to note that this book is geared toward the Microsoft platform. As with any new technology, you need to get information from different resource. If you're using SOAP on the Microsoft platform, the online MSDN contains many examples and update information on SOAP. I found the SOAP newsgroups extremely helpful. It contains solutions to many problems that programmers in the real world encounters. If you will not be using SOAP on a Microsoft platform, I recommend "SOAP cross platform web service" by Scott seely.
One of the BEST SOAP books around
This author obviously knows his material. He provides a lot of examples of how to work with SOAP. All of the examples ran once I compensated for my Web server--the example code uses the author's Web server URL for the obvious reasons. Every example demonstrated one or more SOAP concepts. The examples didn't continuously repeat concepts, as is the problem with many books.The author mixes a little theory with a lot of demonstration. I personally found the mix very useful. Some books assume you want all theory and no demonstration, while others have all demonstration and very little explanation. This book is a nice combination of both.
As with other people writing reviews, I did stumble on the graphics in Chapter 4. However, I feel this is a minor problem given the clarity of the explanations.
My only other concern is the use of VB examples almost to the exclusion of anything else. I would have liked to see a few more Visual C++ examples. I did appreciate the PDA example and the appendix on BizTalk server. The tools appendix is also very worthwhile as it saved me time building a toolkit for SOAP applications.
Outstanding Book--Crummy Graphics in Chapter 4
I gave this book five stars for content. The book contains a considerable number of examples, all of which worked for me. Most helpful was the PDA example. At least I know how to get a single application to work on both a PDA and a desktop machine now.The book is filled with lots of helpful information about troubleshooting, problems that I'd run into (and I did run into several of them), and how to get the best performance from my application. I'm sure the wealth of Web site listings will come in handy too.
The graphics in Chapter 4 are absolutely absurd. They start going off track about Figure 5. It looks like the last two figures in the chapter were supposed to be inserted at Figure 5 and 6. I don't blame the author for this because it looks like he did a great job in every other respect. Hopefully the publisher will fix this problem.
Full of Mistakes
This is the worse computer books I have ever seen. So many error, just stupid mistakes. For example, many of the screenshots are switched so the captions don't match up to the picture, so it is completely impossible to follow. Most of the step-by-step is wrong. And I couldn't get one of the samples to work. (...)
