Rating: 
Summary: Good WSDL coverage too!
Review: Pretty much all the titles I have seen do an adequate job explaining why to use SOAP, what it does, and how great the cross platform stuff is. With the current state of interop, I have found that it is necessary to occasionally create custom "1-off" WSDL files for parties my company is integrating with. The WSDL chapter pretty much explained what I was looking at and was quite a life-saver.This book will also get you up to speed with understanding all the other stuff too. It just covers WSDL in more that a few pages, which has been very helpful and worth the cost of the book on its own.
Rating: 
Summary: Save your money!
Review: Read the previous review to understand the waste
of time and money this book may cause you. It does very little to really describe XML or SOAP in the matter
that is needed. Key elements are skipped or automatically
assumed, while simple concepts are explained in great detail. uggh!
Rating:
Summary: Sorry but ...
Review: Sorry to say, but I felt this book was no more than a first draft . At the end of it, I had no clear idea on how to write a SOAP message without refering to many other books or the spec itself. Sure the book gave me a basic overview of SOAP, but not one that I could take away and use, and gave me an overall impression that SOAP is complicated and messy. This was a rushed effort, and a waste of time. If this is one of the best books available on SOAP, then it doesn't say much for the technical authors currently working on it.
Rating:
Summary: Book is a Waste!
Review: The book explains SOAP on a more advanced level! it provides a custom SOAP implementation written in C++. The book is all over the place. It gets quite confusing for novices that simply want to get started quickly using SOAP.
Rating: 
Summary: Rich case study, conceptual sections come from W3C specs
Review: The book introduces the Microsoft approach to Web services. SOAP part:
- 130 pages, 75 of which feature a C++ implementation of SOAP
- the conceptual SOAP introduction is more or less directly copied from the W3C SOAP 1.1 specification, it even uses the same examples
- the list of available implementations is incomplete and not up to date There are 50 pages on WSDL and UDDI, two technologies complementing SOAP (again more or less a 1:1 copy from the W3C specifications). There is a large case study applying the technologies and the Microsoft tools for them (has a section on interoperability). I did not look into it in detail. An appendix gives some information on SOAP::Lite (Perl).
Rating:
Summary: Best SOAP book I own
Review: The title says it all. If you can afford one SOAP book, get this one. If you can afford 2, get the O'Reilly SOAP book too. Great explanations of the protocol. The C++ SOAP library in the book (client and server) shows how easy it is to do SOAP if you only support a small set of functions. So, if you do embedded development, this book gives you a library that will allow you to support a SOAP endpoint on a small device (memory requirements mean that you will have a bigger footprint. No 64 KB blocks of memory, but what do you expect?).
Rating:
Summary: Failure to explain any basic concepts clearly
Review: There are two extremely catagories of books.
1. Explain unclear concepts with clear logic and clear language.
2. Explain clear concepts with unclear logic and unclear languege.
This book definitely belongs to the second catagory.
How hard XML scheme syntax could be? This book can screw all of them up.
It wastes of your time if you did not already know what SOAP is.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book Useful Case Study
Review: This book is a good introduction into SOAP. The Case Study at the end of the book is very detailed and by following through it, you can gain a solid understanding of SOAP, XML and how to use it. The only drawback is that it doesn't describe in detail the use of SOAP by multiple programming languages. I guess one book can't do all :)
Rating:
Summary: Good book/not for beginning programmers
Review: This is a really good book and I learned a lot from it. After reading some of the reviews, I noticed that people seem to run hot and cold on this book. Since I loved it, I thought I could put in this word of warning: make sure you have done some actual development before grabbing this book. Scott assumes that you understand how to write code and glosses over a lot of that stuff. He does assume you know nothing about XML or SOAP and does an excellent job bringing the reader up to speed.
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