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Rating: 
Summary: Far from excellent. But it earns some credits.
Review: As other reviewers said, there are tons of errors in this book. It did waste a lot of time. However, if you search most of the books on the market today, none of them (or I haven't found one yet) really talks about Java Web Services over JMS. This AXIS book is probably the only one that provides an example where an AXIS server and client can actually talk over JMS. Even though there are errors and the architecture design was not great, yet it should earn some credits on explaining how it is possible to develop and run AXIS over other transport protocols, such as JMS, than HTTP/Servlet only.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the worst
Review: Don't buy it. You can find more and better information from Axis web site. What a waste of time and money.
Rating: 
Summary: Tons of errors, rushed
Review: I bought this book soon after it came out, and was greatly disappointed. This book feels very much like a book that was rushed to press in order to be the first on the market, with little regard to the actual content. Here are a few things that are bad about it: It is very thin, including just 270 pages. The margins on the pages are extremely large (2 inches), apparently to pump up the pagecount. The margins are so wide that all of the code bleed far into them. The book contains no index (inexusable for a technical book). The code examples themselves are much longer than necessary. Every imported class is explicitly imported, with no use of the "*" notation to save space -- another ploy to bump up the page count. There is very little actual discussion in the book -- it mostly consists of UML diagrams and code examples. At least some (perhaps all -- I would not be surprised) of the code examples are copied exactly from example that are freely available with the Axis source (even the comments were copied exactly!), with little or no description of what the code is actually doing. In short, book has about as much original content as an article on Axis. I've owned it for several months now, and I have not found it useful on a single occasion. The examples that come with Axis are superior by far to the code in this book. Don't waste your money.
Rating:
Summary: Better off reading Apache Axis Documentation
Review: I found more and better information at Axis site than from this book. What you cannot find from xml.apache.org, you cannot find in this book either.
Rating:
Summary: Great start, but needs more
Review: My first reaction on recieving the book was that it seemed a bit thin for the kind of information I was hoping to get. After reading the book, I found good material on the architecture of Axis, but few useful examples of how to do anything useful. It would probably have been better to wait until Axis 1.0 was released before publishing. For this book to be truely useful, I would expect it to have at least twice as much material, particulary in the Custom Handlers and Advanced Features sections. As it is, it is only slightly more helpful than the actual documentation.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent architecture overview
Review: Study the diagrams in this book. I found them extremely helpful to understand how Axis works and why it is different from other SOAP implementations. The book was a bit dated when I bought it - Axis is a moving target - but architecture doesn't change that quickly.
Rating: 
Summary: Kick-Starter
Review: This book is a kick-starter for AXIS, a well build implementation. Yes, indeed you can live with the 'man pages' documentations, but relatively faster results would be an uphill climb. And when you need to cut to the chase, you need this Bible. Not just that but all in one: Handbook, Architecture Reference, API Reference and Design Guide etc. If you're already on the SOAP bandwagon, this book is organized to let you cruise through details like JMS implementation, interoperability with .NET C# etc
Significance of this proof is the author's choice to use an existing Web Service ... To tweak AXIS itself, Custom Interfaces (mapping, deployment, serializers/deserializers etc) are explained in an exclusive chapter. You can work your own implementation by referring the samples and little changes to them, to suit your application needs. The concepts are built up in a lucid manner, revolving around a minimalist source code without having different examples for each chapter. The objective of each chapter is thus kept in the forefront; each subsequent chapter improvises on the sample from the previous chapter. In fact, the case study serves as a template for almost 100% of SOAPification of existing Enterprise Java Applications. It would have been better to include some perceptive on best practices & notes-from-the-field suggestions, owing to the brand new technology. Overall, a must read for all those looking for an Open Source based SOAP solution, be a Manager, IT Architect, Wannabe_Web_Service_programmer or just a bystander.
Rating:
Summary: Kick-Starter
Review: This book is a kick-starter for AXIS, a well build implementation. Yes, indeed you can live with the 'man pages' documentations, but relatively faster results would be an uphill climb. And when you need to cut to the chase, you need this Bible. Not just that but all in one: Handbook, Architecture Reference, API Reference and Design Guide etc. If you're already on the SOAP bandwagon, this book is organized to let you cruise through details like JMS implementation, interoperability with .NET C# etc
Significance of this proof is the author's choice to use an existing Web Service from Xmethods.org To tweak AXIS itself, Custom Interfaces (mapping, deployment, serializers/deserializers etc) are explained in an exclusive chapter. You can work your own implementation by referring the samples and little changes to them, to suit your application needs. The concepts are built up in a lucid manner, revolving around a minimalist source code without having different examples for each chapter. The objective of each chapter is thus kept in the forefront; each subsequent chapter improvises on the sample from the previous chapter. In fact, the case study serves as a template for almost 100% of SOAPification of existing Enterprise Java Applications. It would have been better to include some perceptive on best practices & notes-from-the-field suggestions, owing to the brand new technology. Overall, a must read for all those looking for an Open Source based SOAP solution, be a Manager, IT Architect, Wannabe_Web_Service_programmer or just a bystander.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended but beware of many errata
Review: This book is very nice tutorial on Axis. I would recommended it to everyone that wants to learn and practice Web Services using Axis. What I particularly liked is that the book goes right to the essentials of Web Services, SOAP and Axis beta 1 (it's not 10cm thick as others). It it very practice oriented with a lot of samples. It covers serializers and custom handlers (an important part of Axis) very cleary. The chapter on security is also good but limited to SSL and basic authentication (due to the limitation of the current Axis). What I dislike (and the reason I won't give a 5 stars) is the many errata in the sample code (there is a mention of a errata list on the web but there is in fact nothing there). The missing Ant build in the downloadable samples code. And the missing index at the end of the book. I respect the wonderful fast work of the authors but I would expect an errata from Wrox. Some errata I encounted:
- Parameter.IN (instead of Parameter.PARAM_MODE_IN)
- keytool -import -storetype JKS (instead of JCEKS)
otherwise you get a very annoying "invalid keystore format" exception.
- When using Axis beta 2 there are other problems than the clutil.jar that you can ignore. The simplest example with beta 2 doesn't work; you need to download a more recent nightly build. I would stick to beta 1 or wait for beta 3. Buttom line: the book worth it if you want to catch up very quikly with the latest version of SOAP with practical samples. Cheers Alain Hsiung
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