<pre>
Author/s : Mack Hendricks, Ben Galbraith, Romin Irani etc.
Publisher : Wrox
Category : Misc. Java
Review by : Margarita Isayeva
Rating : 5 horseshoes</pre>
I have a feeling that this book will miss its target audience.
The
word "Professional" in series title apparently signals that you are expected to know what Web services are, how they fit in distributed computing model, why do you need them, and whether you need them or not in the first place. The book brings you directly to "how to" and digs into mundane implementation details - lots of code and mandatory for Wrox books case study. It isn't clear for me what value lightly commented code delivers to the audience defined as "professional". All discussed packages (Apache
SOAP, Axis, Glue etc.) come with their own examples and pretty good documentation...
Code-driven approach would serve better not "professionals", but beginners, "following" learners, if to use Alistair Cockburn's terminology. "They need one (procedure - M.I.) to learn first, one that works. They copy it; they learn it." Of course, to be useful for beginners, discussion needs to be more gentle and instructions more detailed and accurate...
It wouldn't be fair to say there is nothing besides commented code, though. There are "theoretical" chapters for each contributing protocol: SOAP, WSDL, UDDI etc. which do not deviate too far from corresponding specifications. There are chapters on assorted issues from security to JAXM/JAXR, but I did not get much from a brief overview.
In short, this book is too difficult and too terse for inexperienced programmers, and too verbose and unfocused for experienced folk.
More info at Amazon.com More info at Amazon.co.uk