Reviews for SOA Principles of Service Design (Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl)

1. Fundamental and Independent

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, July 12nd, 2009

   Read and re-read this thorough and comprehensive guide to the absolute fundamentals of becoming service-oriented in your thinking, then we will all speak the same language and not be limited to what one or other large vendor tells us. This is not a book aimed at developers who are hands-on delivering software it is aimed at the conceptual architects who have to decide on models and components that make up the software landscape in their company. In any large enterprise there will be in-bedded systems and entrenched views on delivering in silos. Erl describes how to evolve these expensive and unproductive silos into true reusable and independent artifacts. SOA is getting some bad press lately but anything that improves understanding of how to build better enterprise integration is welcome. I look forward to future offerings on federated SOA.

2. Disappointing

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, May 12nd, 2009

   This book is extremely verbose, but light on real meat. It spends 400 pages looking at SOA design from a viewpoint of getting maximum re-use, but doesn't balance this against practical considerations like performance which only occupy a couple of pages. Read it, but don't implement it as is, without balancing it against some other authors viewpoints.

3. Not for a developer

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, December 12st, 2008

   As a developer interested in SOA I bought this book hoping to learn about service design and best practices. I found this book very dry and did not feel that I got much from the book. It is the first book I have bought that I have not completed. (I got 3/4 of the way before losing the will to read.)

4. Awful

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, November 12th, 2008

   This is certainly one of the worst books I've read. My main complaints are:
   
   1) The book is incredibly slow/tedious and boring, though I should have expected that after reading some of Erl's other books.
   2) The style of SOA described is, in my view, not workable for most companies. For example its focussed on upfront design and entity services with lots of reuse. A few google searches will show that this is not the only approach you can take and in my view a business oriented SOA, using agile approaches and wrapping coherent domain models is a totally valid alternative.
   
   In any case I wouldn't recommend anyone read this, instead I'd recommend that people look at Enterprise SOA which is a far more interesting read.

5. A must-read for SOA practitioners

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2008

   Great book!
   Thomas Erl documents a set of guidelines for effective design decisions to make SOA real.
   This book fills the gap between the pubblications that cover SOA in pure conceptual terms and those that deal with the details of web service implementations.
   Each chapter cuts through the hype of SOA by giving clear definitions, guidelines, and metrics that link the conceptual, logical and physical aspects of a Service Oriented Architecture.
   This series is going to become for SOA what "Design patterns" of the "Gang of Four" has been for Object Oriented design.
   I am looking forward to reading the next pubblication: SOA Patterns.