Applied SOAP: Implementing .NET Web Services

Rating:
Summary: Great book on .NET and SOAP
Review: Here's what you get in the book: you will learn how to use .NET in order to shape your SOAP messages. There's a lot to know and understand: manipulating XML, creating custom attributes, debugging, reading messages. This book covers all of those items in detail and has the code to save you time. The book tells me exactly what I needed to know in order to make better use of SOAP in my .NET applications. Kenn teaches this stuff for Wintellect and developed the course on this. It's also pretty clear that the day jobs for both these guys involves writing Web Services. When you are done with the book, you will understand all you need in order to write your own Web Services.

I read the two other reviews and I don't understand why the readers are complaining. SOAP is one way to do Web Services and is the only thing that the authors talk about in the entire book. Perhaps this reader has a problem with the fact that, for the most part, SOAP == Web Services? As for the horrible waste of time review, I again think that the person didn't really look at the book. This is the best book I have seen to date which describes how to mold your SOAP messages, write custom attributes, etc. These guys explain pretty well what SOAP is for. Better for Web Page scraping? I think that reviewer simply picked up a copy in a book store, read 2 pages, and that's it.

Rating:
Summary: Good book, title could use some work
Review: I really enjoyed this book but I think that the title was misleading. There was as much (or more) information about web services and .net as there was about soap.

Overall the book covered a broad set of topics and showed some good example code. If you're new to web services and soap, and you plan on using .net, this book will get you good coverage in a small amount of time. If you don't intend to use .net, there are still some interesting topics, but the sample code won't help much.

Rating:
Summary: horrible waste of time
Review: I received this book, hoping to get some inside clues on how SOAP is implemented in .NET. I was running into some more sophisticated needs. I found the book to be full of general fluff. E.g., at the beginning it brings this corny motivation for SOAP that it's a better way for web page scraping. It actually believes that SOAP was made to replace code opening yahoo financials pages, and scraping stock quotes out of it. Hello? SOAP works along EDI and Corba. It's a simplified version of both that makes it easier and language/platform independent for those cases that don't need the full functionality of EDI or Corba.

Well, then there is a quote, where the author blankly asserts that posts are more useful then gets. I'm familiar with the debate about the pros and cons. But, an author just asserting one is better and putting as a reason 'trust me, baby, I'm smart', is just so pretentious.

To put it plain from flipping around in the book, I didn't find any good information, and the author just disgusted me with his way of writing and assertions. This is a total utter waste of time and money.