.NET Web Services for Dummies

Rating:
Summary: For Dummies?
Review: After plowing through the first 60 pages of this book, I realized there is room for a level or two below "Dummy". The author, Anthony Mann, claims that this book was written equally for the beginner and intermediate level. I guess it depends on how you define "beginner". I manage the Intranet for a large financial institution, and while I have some working knowledge of HTML, I am a business manager, not a programmer. I looked to a dummy-level book to help me understand the opportunities that web services will offer my world.

If you're in the same boat as me, be sure you know something about programming before you buy this book. If you don't, you'll likely be confused by lines like "The system namespace provides a set of fundamental classes (including methods, properties, and events) that yields base-level services for .NET." Huh? What's a base-level service? And what are classes? I didn't know the techy lingo, so I found it impossible to get a foothold anywhere in the book. And I only read the intro pages...I can only imagine how lost I'd be in the later chapters.

Bottom line: this book isn't for you if you have no coding background.

Rating:
Summary: Great!!
Review: After plowing through the first 60 pages of this book, I realized there is room for a level or two below "Dummy". The author, Anthony Mann, claims that this book was written equally for the beginner and intermediate level. I guess it depends on how you define "beginner". I manage the Intranet for a large financial institution, and while I have some working knowledge of HTML, I am a business manager, not a programmer. I looked to a dummy-level book to help me understand the opportunities that web services will offer my world.

If you're in the same boat as me, be sure you know something about programming before you buy this book. If you don't, you'll likely be confused by lines like "The system namespace provides a set of fundamental classes (including methods, properties, and events) that yields base-level services for .NET." Huh? What's a base-level service? And what are classes? I didn't know the techy lingo, so I found it impossible to get a foothold anywhere in the book. And I only read the intro pages...I can only imagine how lost I'd be in the later chapters.

Bottom line: this book isn't for you if you have no coding background.

Rating:
Summary: Great!!
Review: Despite the previous reviewer's assertion that this book is too advanced for the "dummies" line, I am sure that if you read this book *closely* all of your basic questions would be answered. I actually think the author did an amazing job of incorporating and summarizing much of what seems like an insurmountable topic,.NET, XML and Web Services, in one book.

Kudos to the author. I highly recommend this book for .NET overview and intro to web services. It will even have you constructing, debugging and deploying them in no time.

Rating:
Summary: Very Disappointing
Review: This book offers no step by step lessons which is to say the least VERY FRUSTRATING when you are learning a new technology. There are bits and pieces throughout this book that are nice to know but are absolutely useless when you cant apply them to a real world scenerio. I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THIS BOOK.

Rating:
Summary: Just the right level for non .netters
Review: This book was a joy to read and presented a great holistic approach to .net web services. By that I mean it covered the subject from A to Z including such relevant topics as firewalls, SSL, RAID, UDDI, etc. It is important to have an understanding of the whole infrastructure encompassed by .net web services.

I have a background in programming including some web development 4 years ago (prior to .net). Yet I found the book very informative and am thankful I got over my 'a dummy book is not for me' attitude. For example, the author did a history of COM, DCOM, COM+ in nutshell that really helped explain the problems web services solved.

The book goes into web services development in enough detail to get you started coding. For serious development you would want a more detailed reference but this is a great starting point.

The author has demonstrated an excellent grasp of the web development landscape and put it all together in a cohesive fashion. If you want to find out what the .net furor is all about I highly recommend this author.