Author: Eric Newcomer, Greg Lomow
Publisher: Addison Wesley
Price: £28.99
Pages: 444
ISBN: 0321180860
Aimed at: Software architects
Pros: Concise and well written
Cons: A strange mix of overview and details
Reviewed by: Sam Mckenzie
Verdict: :-)
Buy Now

Published: 17 April 2005

This is an ideal book if you need to educate management in what SOA is all about. It has code examples in C++ and C#, but these aren’t essential to follow the ideas. It explains why SOA is important and what web services have to do with it all. It deals with the problems of security and efficiency, but all at that strange level where details are explained too superficially to be much help with the nitty-gritty of implementation. There are tutorials on WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-AtomicTransations, WS-Composite Application Framework, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, and WS-PEL.

This is too detailed to be an overview and not detailed enough to be a developer’s how-to-do-it. It occupies that shady area – on the one hand technically informed, but at the same time removed from the need to do something real. However, if you need a book that eases you into the ideas behind SOA this is not bad at all.

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