Rating: 
Summary: Professor
Review: This is a MUST-HAVE book for anyone who is interested in web services. Web service is arguably the next-big-thing in web technology. Yet there is often confusion between web services that expose functionalities in an open standard and web interfaces that expose presentations in an open standard. Not only this book clarifies the confusion, it goes much further to provide much insightful information from different perspectives; e.g., design patterns in software engineering, application development for wireless devices and enterprise web services deployment. I just wish this book could have been available earlier in the market! My overall rating for this book is EXCELLENT!
Rating:
Summary: Chief Scientist
Review: This is a surpringly well written, well organized book. Just about all of the major web service technologies are covered in just enough detail to give the reader a good understand of how they work and why they are needed. In addition, there are lots of simple, yet complete code samples that prepare the reader for detailed specifications and API documentation.The book also includes background coverage of fundamental XML concepts, such as XML schema. It is worthwhile as a reference alone. This book is much more than SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI (although these are covered in detail). This book includes advanced topics such as Web Services Conversation Language (WSCL), workflow, and transactions. The examples are easy to understand and complete. Overall, this is a professionally written book for professionals.
Rating: 
Summary: solid and timely
Review: Web services are an evolving technology for machine to machine interoperability. What's frustrated me is that books in this space seem to be either too narrowly focused on programming platforms or quickly dated. This book is a breath of fresh air: it's up to date and deals primarily with web services as a technology rather than a bolt-on. In my opinion, this is the current book to own for starting to get your brain around web services. It stands out as being very useful to me as an architect.
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