Reviews for Understanding SOA with Web Services

1. Tedious and confusingly repetitive

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2009

   I bought this book expecting a readable overview of SOA and Web Services for a reasonably technology-literate, though not deeply geeky, reader. I was very disappointed.
   
   The style, while on the face of it quite light and engaging, turns out to be very annoying.
   
   - It fluctuates between assuming quite a lot of background understanding, and (re-)stating pretty simplistic ideas.
   
   - Several times I found the same phrase repeated a number of times a few pages apart, in slightly different contexts, giving a confusing sense of deja-vu, and disrupting the flow while I check I'm not inadvertently re-reading a page.
   
   - Acronyms are scattered widely without explanation or a reference (then suddenly clarified many pages later) - would it have hurt to provide at least an explanatory list of them as an appendix?
   
   - The book is liberally illustrated with diagrams, but on closer inspection many turn out to be pretty well content-free. And there are often confusing discrepancies between the text that references the diagrams, and the diagram content (such as it is!) itself.
   
   - There are also quite a few surprising lapses of editing, with missing words and typos; not important in themselves, but it all leads to a general feeling of sloppy writing.
   
   There is much of value here, but the authors seem to have made it as hard to get through as possible. I suspect that if you already have some familiarity with the ideas discussed, the problems I had will not be significant. But if you're starting from the same place as me, I would not recommend buying this book.
   
   Oh, and one other thing: the publication date on my copy is 2005. I suspect that in this fast-moving subject area, this now makes this edition a bit too old to be relied on.

2. Compulsory reading

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

   I'm back here to purchase my 6th copy of this book, and 7th of Newcomer's earlier book ("Understanding Web Services"), as they are becoming compulsory reading in my division of a large and highly influential Financial Services technology player.

   Newcomer and Lomow have done an outstanding job of putting a pragmatic, business and user-focused face on a field that is often either over-hyped, or too focused on technology for technology's sake. That is not to say that they only address the business-heads in this book (far from it - Newcomer in particular has been deeply involved in Web services technology and standards development since the very beginning, and this depth of knowledge of the technology is evident throughout), it is just that their discussion of the technology, even at its most abstract is easy to follow and well grounded in real-world benefits.

   Rarely will you find a technical book written in such an approachable tone. Even more rarely will it cover the technology with the breadth and depth that these two industry luminaries demonstrate.

   I have been working on the cutting edge of Web services and Mobile Web services for more than five years, but I can't count the number of times I uncovered a new and refreshing insight, or invaluable example based on the experience of the authors.

   Perhaps the real value of this book, though, is demonstrated by my recent experience - When I show a copy to a senior manager they come back a few days later and ask me to get more copies. When I show a copy to a technical colleague, I have to fight to get it back!

   Buy this book.