Rating: 
Summary: As Complete as it can be
Review: Finally, Wrox's complete BizTalk book. As complete as the product itself, nothing less! This book will take you, as either a developer or an administrator (or both!), through all facets that makes a successfull BizTalk Server installation.As with previous Stephen book, this one takes a case-study through most of the book and complement it with the new features or the chapter. You will learn to leverage each of those functionality in order to achieve our case-study project. Also usual, this book contains a lot of very technical knowledge, knowledge found deeply inside the BizTalk server with a big touch of experience, all given to the readers in this book!
Rating:
Summary: This book makes a complex tool easy.
Review: I judge a book by the number of weekends I have brought it home for my weekend reading. This is the sixth straight weekend this book ended up coming home with me. Simply superb work. Loved the chapter on Advance Orchestration. The chapter on message Tracking is well explained too. Business process orchestration is a complex topic but the examples in this book makes it easy to understand. Get this book if you're serious about learning BizTalk.
Rating:
Summary: This book makes a complex tool easy.
Review: I judge a book by the number of weekends I have brought it home for my weekend reading. This is the sixth straight weekend this book ended up coming home with me. Simply superb work. Loved the chapter on Advance Orchestration. The chapter on message Tracking is well explained too. Business process orchestration is a complex topic but the examples in this book makes it easy to understand. Get this book if you're serious about learning BizTalk.
Rating: 
Summary: As good as there is
Review: I read this book as soon as it was published. Didn't cross my mind to review it until I read the other reviews. Let's face it -- there isn't a lot of material available on this topic. At least one of the co-authors is from MS. In order to get anything out of this book after chapter 5, though, you must take the time to work through their examples (which can be tedious and wordy) and do the exercises (which have mistakes and skip steps). You also must accept that BizTalk is a big product that you have to work with a long time to get the big picture -- and then once you get the big picture, you have to work out the little details. That's what this book does. If you are looking for a simple how-to guide, or a quick read, run away. If you are looking for a book that will guide you through a path of BizTalk self-discovery AND you are willing to put out a rather hefty effort, this book will reward you in the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Still Worthwhile
Review: I realize a newer version of BizTalk is available and that the underlying technology has changed significantly (most notably the change in orchestration languages). However, I suspect there are many of you still out there who, like myself, must continue to work with older BizTalk implementations.
For those of you, I would like to recommend this book. It is not a masterpiece in writing or style, but it provides you with loads of useful information and tips that goes well beyond the Microsoft BTS product documentation. Its examples aren't the easiest to follow, but if you take the time to actually install them on your server, they turn out to be very helpful.
You won't find much more good documentation on older BizTalk versions anymore, so definitely get this book if it is still of use to you. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than hiring MCS consultants!
Rating: 
Summary: Very frustrating book to read
Review: I started witht his book witha lot of interest. But reading this was really a frustrating thing. It certainly failed in putting pieces together. There is more unnecessary talk in this book than useful content. If you are serious about learning BizTalk, This is not the book for you. Go somewhere else.
Rating:
Summary: Biztalk only for "high-level", according to Wrox
Review: I would have to agree with purplebari, after chapter 5 things did go down hill. The web page code was definately wrong. I sent an email to the publisher back on 3/16/01 and they confirmed the problem and said they would change it. I had also brought up the fact that they did not explicitly say to compile a DLL and they told me, "The book assumes the reader will be able to compile their own dll's (if they are high-level enough to work with biztalk)." In the intro, they say you don't need to know VB to get a lot from the book. If you don't know VB and not "high-level enough", you may not want to get this book.
Rating:
Summary: Biztalk only for "high-level", according to Wrox
Review: I would have to agree with purplebari, after chapter 5 things did go down hill. The web page code was definately wrong. I sent an email to the publisher back on 3/16/01 and they confirmed the problem and said they would change it. I had also brought up the fact that they did not explicitly say to compile a DLL and they told me, "The book assumes the reader will be able to compile their own dll's (if they are high-level enough to work with biztalk)." In the intro, they say you don't need to know VB to get a lot from the book. If you don't know VB and not "high-level enough", you may not want to get this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A wordy book with a lot of typing errors.
Review: Im not sure what most of the other reviewers are talking about when they say fantastic and great examples (They must be on ...). I found the book to be very wordy and very unclear in its explanation of what it was trying to say. The examples within the book had typing errors and wrong variable names definition. This all added to a long and tedious task of interpreting and making the examples work. Even the Sample code downloaded from the wrox site had errors in them, some of the code was not complete so you had to second guess the author. As stated from a few of the other reviewers, after chapter 5 all things really went down hill, If you tried going through the example on chapter 6 you would work out nothing really makes sense. The explanations where worded for a person with a PHD in mental telepathy . Apart from this, the book serves its purpose, there was nothing else out there at the time. But honestly I would of expected a better presented and documented book from WROX.
Rating:
Summary: Best available BizTalk book, but still unsatisfying
Review: The authors do the best they can working from Microsoft's grossly inadequate product documentation. BizTalk is a complicated product, and yet Microsoft has made very little information available about how it actually works. This book reflects that: the authors seem well-versed on accomplishing specific programming tasks, but they impart very little knowledge of BizTalk internals or architecture. The examples are good and the coverage of the material is comprehensive. However, the text is rather long-winded, and at times material could be expressed much more succinctly. Also, I would have liked to have seen more "how-to" examples as opposed to long-running sample applications that span multiple chapters. As usual, though, Wrox outclasses the other technical publishers with the best book yet on BizTalk.
| 
