Rating: 
Summary: Good overall Web services intro book
Review: I am totally new to Web services, and know not a lot about XML. This book I found was for me a very nice general overall introduction to webservices. It was enough to get me immediatley started in Web services. I can definitley recommend this book to anyone new to Web services.
Rating: 
Summary: Dated, but still valuable
Review: I realise this book is now out of date, and therefore not relevant to much of what is happening in the Web Services world. However, when I first read it, it did help me get an understanding of some of the more important Web Services fundamentals. The tutorials on WSDL and SOAP especially were useful to me, as were the comparions of the various vendor toolkits that implemented SOAP messaging. There may be more current books out there, but if you can get a used or discounted copy of this title, it's still worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: I gave up on Web services after reading this book!
Review: I would rather wait for the tech to mature for better quality books. I got lost and never proceeded to read after a few
initial chapters. My advice to the authors would be to keep the readers interested and not throw him/her off course and lose interest totally in the subject.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed examples, and inaccuracy
Review: This book is another quality edition to the Wrox library. If you are thinking about buying this book, make sure you have some knowledge about XML, since the authors don't delve too much into the basics of XML. However, XML is a huge piece of the Web Services mix.Be ready to learn some new tech jargon and to memorize and decipher a plethora of acronyms (SOAP, UDDI, XML, etc.) but Web Services are very likely the future of distributed programming, so the knowledge is very valuable no matter how long it takes you to figure it all out. The only other possible downer about this book is that some of the specifications the authors detail are not full recommendations by the W3C and are subject to change...but my take is that after you learn the technology once, the changes you will see with final drafts are not drastic enough to require further learning.
Rating:
Summary: Very Poor Book!
Review: This book is poorly written and organized. While a few chapters and topics are treated well enough most of the content is jumbled and confused and one wonders if the authors in some places actually understand their topics. There are too many good books such as the ORielly books or the Sams book on Web Services to even bother with this book. Skip it and spend your more money on another book.
Rating:
Summary: Very Poor Book!
Review: This book is poorly written and organized. While a few chapters and topics are treated well enough most of the content is jumbled and confused and one wonders if the authors in some places actually understand their topics. There are too many good books such as the ORielly books or the Sams book on Web Services to even bother with this book. Skip it and spend your more money on another book.
Rating:
Summary: I gave up on Web services after reading this book!
Review: This book is so uselessly organized that it is painful to read. Perhaps my problem is that I bought it for the purpose of doing development, not reading and re-reading. I found the .NET Web Services chapter so useful that, after several attempts to figure some stuff out using it, I went to my Web Services chapter of the Wrox Professional C# book, which was far more useful. The first 57 pages of this book are in a chapter entitled Evolution of Web Services. The book reads like a poor graduate-level text, which means that you would only read it if it were required. This book may appeal to you if you found reading raw API documentation useful and intuitive. I can't imagine that what they are doing here isn't better available for free through online help in .NET. Or elsewhere on the internet. A book like this should result in a lot of demand for classes, because the book itself will make people think they can't figure it out. These people either can't write, or can't organize in a fluid, alive sort of way, or didn't have time to. Either way, this book is a big time waster. Microsoft has some decent walkthroughs. This book offers a lot of useless information, which becomes noise for readers who want to create deliverables. If you want to get up and get going, go elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Web Services book currently available
Review: This is a good intro to various topics related to web services, probably the best one available so far (admittedly a pretty small field at this time). It covers the standards behind the technology and proceeds to practical working examples of how to put web services into use. There is some coverage of projected future technologies, but mostly sticks to systems that are currently available (skipping, for example, Apache Axis). The author-per-chapter approach means the chapters are somewhat independent, so you can select a topic of interest and go right to that chapter, without having to read everything that came before it. On the other hand, it means some material is covered in multiple places in the book.
Rating:
Summary: A pretty good anthology about web services
Review: This is a pretty good anthology about web services, with a number of different topics covered in depth. I like that you can read just a chapter about a subject of interest without having to read the whole book up to that point. At 1000 pages, I wouldn't want to read the whole book from beginning to end anyway. However, it is uneven. There are some good chapters about SOAP, but other chapters, for example, UDDI, are not so good.
Rating:
Summary: Mixed examples, and inaccuracy
Review: This is the first of what promises to be a slew of new books coming out on Web Services. As the first book out I guess it's what you'd expect from a book rushed to press. The examples are frequently flawed. If you're already familiar with most of the technology, or you're willing to read the documentation of the WSTK and various Apache documents along with this book you'll find this book a good primer. However, if you're new don't go for this book. The examples tend to be a mixed jumble flowing from COM, Java, NET and even Perl occasionally with in the same example. If you're planning on using all those technologies (and have them all set up) you might be ok. However, if you just want to build a Java webservice, well this isn't the book for you.
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