Reviews for Understanding Enterprise SOA

1. not worth reading

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

   I was lent this book by a colleague at work (who had not read it yet) to get an understanding of Enterprise SOA. The book is poorly written; simple concepts take a whole page to explain and are then repeatedly explained again and again. Even though the author takes 16 chapters to explain Enterprise SOA, the important discussions in the book can be condensed to a single chapter at most.
   
   Give the book a miss; there are better SOA books out there.
   

2. Doesn't give the answers

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2005

   I bought this book becuase I am just embarking on my second major SOA project and I wanted an authoritative view on using SOA. I was very dissapointed. The introductory chapter on "Loose Coupling" contained fundamental misundertsandings on topics like OO and standards development in the IT industry. Overall, the book presents SOA as just EAI on steroids.

   Topics such as service decomposition are superfiicially addressed; intra-application services - a major source of "discussion" on my project are absent.

   Overall, this book is too superficial and seems to have been written without sufficient understanding of the real issues which arise when you try to do SOA in anger.