Service-Oriented Architecture : A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services

Rating:
Summary: Insightful
Review: Very good reference for designing web services. Takes many low-level considerations into account, relating mostly to XML data formatted documents. What I also liked about this book is being able to read about web services without references to specific programming languages. It gives you a good grasp of concepts that you can take into development with you. This book should appeal to anyone wanting to get a broader perspective of the web services platform. It also has the best descriptions of service oriented integration architectures I've seen. Erl's loose writing style makes some of the more complex subjects easy to get. Thumbs up from me.

Rating:
Summary: This was helpful
Review: We are struggling with webservices/soa migration issues. Two of our systems are causing us a lot of problems. This book helped us with planning and education. It gave us different ideas for approaching migration and integration. This book gave us a migration strategy that is working. Not bad for forty dollars!

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning how webservices can be positioned to enable integration. The author provides many sample architectures and scenarios. A lot of detailed XML issues are also covered. These are more suitable for developers, because they deal mostly with optimization and modeling techniques. Also useful to us was the step by step process for designing soa friendly components. I've never seen this anywhere else, and I would imagine it is extremely important right now when so many of us are still building distributed apps w/o webservices. This book is pretty light on the tutorial end. But it doesn't claim to be a tutorial because it focuses on real world issues. If you are new to all of this I'd recommend you start with a webservices tutorial first. The author is also releasing a tutorial-type book on soa next year which I will buy. Also, this book has a decent support Web site (www.serviceoriented.ws) with a glossary and a diagram symbol legend that is not in the book.