Reviews for Developing Web Services with Apache CXF and Axis2 (3rd edition)

1. Excellent Text for Getting Productive Quickly with Web Services

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2010

   My need is to understand and become productive quickly with web services as part of a Service Oriented Architecture. This book certainly fulfilled my need. In fact, the hands-on, tutorial style 'cuts-to-the-chase' so quickly, that I had to adjust my own reading style, developed on more verbose books, to ensure I that I read everything very carefully and didn't miss anything important by 'skimming'.
   
   The book is focused very strongly getting tasks done with the tool set and spends only the space absolutely needed on acronyms, standards and protocols, to support the core objective of learning how to create web services. In my view, this is an advantage for the practically-minded reader. There are enough references in the book to enable the reader to gain wider coverage on the areas not discussed in detail.
   
   The book uses Eclipse and Maven as the build tools and Jetty/Tomcat as the application servers, wise choices in my opinion, but I had no problem using the tools to which I am constrained: Oracle JDeveloper, Ant and OC4J, simply by adding the various libraries detailed in the book to my development environment.
   
   The paper version of the book, published in January 2010 suffers from a few errata, but these are quickly corrected by the author in the electronic version, which I have found to be worth the extra investment, especially in view of the regular email updates.
   
   The book lacks the polish and rigorous proof-reading of the big publishing houses and there are one or two small areas where grammatical or punctuation problems creep in, but this doesn't seem to affect the clarity of the text or the ideas being conveyed.
   
   I would highly recommend this book to experienced Java programmers who need to get to grips with web services concepts quickly to build some real web services functionality. System architects requiring an abstract, theoretical treatment may be best served elsewhere.