Reviews for Programming Web Services with Perl

1. Disappointing

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2006

   I agree with the last reviewer's comments about too much time being spent discussing how clever the interface is. I would much prefer that they presented a toolkit whose interface was straightforward. I don't care if there are multiple, clever ways to do the same thing. It just makes the learning process that much more difficult. Because most of the SOAP-related Perl code they show is using SOAP::Lite, the book has to be judged considering the quality of that module and its documentation. With every previous Perl module I've downloaded from CPAN it has been possible to put something together relatively quickly based on the code provide in the SYNOPSIS section. This was not true with SOAP::Lite. I bought this book expecting it to make up for the poor documentation provided in the PODs for the SOAP::Lite package, but I found it did not help much. Disappointing.

2. superficial explanation of developing Perl clients

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, September 12th, 2003

   This book gets off to a good start with a background explanation of SOAP, but then when they get to a description of writing a Perl client, which must be the most common reason for buying the book, it all goes wrong.
   There is just one chapter on writing a Perl client.
   There are a few short examples, that suffer terribly from 'look how clever the toolkit is' syndrome, with no real explanation of how you tackle writing your own clients from scratch given details of a service. It also assumes you are a reasonably strong Perl programmer, which is probably a drawback from some readers.
   Then almost the entire second half of the book is devoted to writing servers, which I wasn't interested in.
   Sorry guys, but this book didn't help me out much at all with learning how to write Perl clients for web services.