Rating: 
Summary: Go elsewhere for the subject
Review: It is almost impossible to keep track trying to make sense of much of the written text. The author jumps from one concept to another without any logical structure. You can read a paragraph many times over without being able to understand what are the ideas behind the words.
Rating: 
Summary: not bad...
Review: not many example programs, it's more of a general information book on web services and what's available with dotnet. It covers a lot of ground and seemed like a lot of subjects covered in 1 chapter could have entire books written about them. I did notice a few of errors in the example code snippits and examples but nothing major. Recommended
Rating: 
Summary: It's difficult to read...
Review: The book covers a lot of subjects. However, the author were not able to illustrate many subjects in a coherent way. In the end, you don't get much by reading the book.
Rating:
Summary: Not worth the trouble
Review: This book does contain quite a bit of valuable information, but it is not worth extracting it. The book is quite poorly written and has no comprehensible flow. The material is arranged in subject areas according to chapter, but that is about all you get. Furthermore, the vast number of errors make the hassle of reading this book even worse. Reading this book is like having gravel in your granola. It it likely better to starve, while you look for something, anything, else. This one is a major disappointment. I paid for the book and need to learn this stuff for a cert test, so I am reading it anyway. You don't have to suffer through it like me!
Rating: 
Summary: Small Errors Add Up
Review: This book first sets out to familiarize the reader with the overall architecture of web services. The author then digs into the relevant specs underlying the technology (schemas, SOAP, and WSDL, in particular). Finally, after laying the foundation, the author then explores the implementation of web services in the .Net framework, covering a host of practical matters such as security and debugging, as well as discovery via UDDI and DISCO. The book concludes with a discussion of the emerging GXA set of specifications. While I thought the author did a good job of covering the material, the large number of small errors in the code (and occasionally in the text) became increasingly distracting. The book would have benefited greatly from more rigorous technical editing. From Microsoft Press, this is quite disappointing, as their books are generally quite accurate (IMHO). I also thought that the schema discussion was less clear than the W3C's freely available "XML Schema Part 0: Primer."
Rating:
Summary: Building XML Web Services for the Microsoft .Net Platform
Review: This book is filled with errors. The examples do not work and the fixes and updates from the Microsoft web site are incomplete and do not work.
Rating:
Summary: More like a reference book
Review: This book is organized in such a way that people can read what they want to "learn" without going through previous chapters. While this is good for people who want to learn-on-the-fly, you really have to know what you are doing and what functions you want to call. This is clearly not the case for newbies. Author's wordings and writing style are often confusing, it sometimes forces me to re-read previous sections in order to follow.
Rating:
Summary: More like a reference book
Review: This book is organized in such a way that people can read what they want to "learn" without going through previous chapters. While this is good for people who want to learn-on-the-fly, you really have to know what you are doing and what functions you want to call. This is clearly not the case for newbies. Author's wordings and writing style are often confusing, it sometimes forces me to re-read previous sections in order to follow.
Rating:
Summary: Practical Web Services examples
Review: This book may seem very disperse in terms of the topics covered regarding Web Services, but I found that to be valuable given that it does not provide the typical basic examples. Having said that I believe this is a good book for intermediate and advanced .NET developers with already proficient on Web Services. These are some comments regarding specific sections of the book:
* A third of the book is spent explainning web service basics, SOAP, WSDL and XML schema which is something not very valuable for proficient web service developers, but good for beginners.
* I found the chapter and samples on XML Serialization good to understand the custom XML serialization mechanisms available in .NET.
* The .NET remoting chapter is a good introduction to Remoting, though I haven't run the sample code.
* The UDDI chapter provides sample code on how to use the MS UDDI SDK to work with tModel documents. This is the first .NET web services book I read that actualy shows how to access UDDI programatically.
* The chapter on security has a good overview of security mechanisms available for Web Services, but has poor examples (WS-Security is only covered in words, as it wasn't supported when the book was published).
* Other valuable info: table of mapping between XSD and .NET types; examples on how to use SOAP headers.
Rating: 
Summary: Web services is the future
Review: Web services in simple words write software as a service. This book starts with what is XML webservice and why we need it. And then how to create a web servies, how to consume it. Second chapter has two very simple easy to understand examples. Remoting and security are the best topics in this book. This book also explains SOAP, WSDL, UDDI (protocols for the web services). PS: This book expects readers to know C#. All the examples are in C#.
Dislikes: No word about caching. Too expensive. Title should say using C#.
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