James Snell | Doug Tidwell | Pavel Kulchenko
1 Complete rubbish
I was so keen to learn from this book but no matter how hard I tried it was far more nonsence to be readable
2 Nice introduction
If you are new to SOAP and you want to get the overall picture, and you don't care for details, this is the book you need.
If you need a reference guide, this is not the book you want.
If you're looking for a book about SOAP on a particular platform (say Java), this is not the book you need.
3 Nice introduction
If your pretty new at SOAP, and if you need an overview, then this is the book you want.
If you don't care about interoperability, and you just want a book on SOAP within a particular environment (say Java), then this is not the book you want.
If you need a reference guide, then you don't need this book.
4 Disappointing and thin
This book was a disappointment. I got thrown into an XML/SOAP project and had to get up to speed in short order. After struggling on my own for a while I bought this book hoping it would have lots of meat on actually using SOAP::Lite, but it had pretty thin coverage.
I did like the big-picture overview of the various technologies, but it was not very helpful in writing an actual SOAP client to talk to a third party's SOAP server. Considering that the author of SOAP::Lite also wrote this book, it seems to me that there could have been a whole chapter on SOAP::Lite from the client view.
This will stay on my shelf as a reference, but for getting up to speed rapidly on actually writing a SOAP client, it was a bust.
5 No Nonsense Broad Introduction
This book is a nice introduction to SOAP. It doesn't get caught in the Software wars and has examples of most existing systems. Another advantage: it is a thin book and not a 1000 pages bible. So you can easily read it in a weekend and then decide where you want to dig deeper (if necessary).
6 Don't Waste Your Money
This book is a good candidate for the city dump. This, in my experience, the book is one of the worst O'Reilly books and should have never been published! Sloppy examples riddled with errors. Why, the eratta page on the O'Reilly web site appears to be written by a reader. The ony correction I found in the "Official" errata was a mis-spelled author name. I'm setting fire to my copy as soon as I submit this review!
7 Not good enought
Book contains too short examples and samples are written
in many languages. The "clue of book" is also missing.
This is too "basic stuff" and is not suitable for a programmer. The good architectual overview of Web Services and how it works is also missing. Looking for a better book, maybe Java related.
8 Could be better
What can I say, not worth of buying.
Too short samples that were written in too many languages.
Architectual overview for Web Services was too short too.
Waiting for better book.
9 Short examples doesn't get to the core...
This book would have been a great oportunity to get to the core to provide a
good set of examples of SOAP application development. Unfortunately it shows how hard is to get functionality of a SOAP app from
three differnt languages. It is a messy affair. One gets excited at the begining to see simple Perl implementations but then it starts with the Java mess and that other language... There are too many XML snippets thrown around without a careful presentation of the big picture. People who write on SOAP get all excited about the XML representation of the protol and forget completely that it is the programing API that counts: XML is not for human consumtion unless it is less than 10 lines long!!!!
The UDDI and WSDL stuff, forget it. It is easier to go and fetch examples from the web.
I hope the authors reconsider their approach and produce a really
really revised second edition including better overview the protocol (less on long XML listings) and sections on when does it make sense to use SOAP. So far this one is not a good one.
10 Missed the most versatile tool for SOAP
Looks like other reviewers have beaten this book up on other aspects, so I'm not going to repeat what they say.
Another important fact that this book misses is that the Python language has the most flexible and "make sense" implementation of SOAP library.
I have dealt with SOAP since mid-last year when we need to find a technology that will bridge COM and Java world that performs acceptably. The choice fell on SOAP. Since our system is Java-based, we need to use Java SOAP.
The interesting point is that it took us just 2 weeks to come up with a Python prototype program which we continuously use to measure up the Java SOAP implementation which ends up taking us months to complete.
This shows just how up-to-date the Python community is in keeping up with new technologies (those that have potentials).
So why Python is not included in the selection of the language in this book is beyond me.
NOTE: For readers who ask "Python-what??": Python is a typeless language that is more readable than Visual Basic but as versatile as Perl.
11 Cannot believe this an O'Reilly Title.......
I usually give preference to O'Reilly's books when looking to purchase a book on a certain programming technology. O'Reilly is generally ahead of the pack in terms of writing style, author's reputation, and knowledge of the subject. Unfortunately, I have little to no confidence in the knowledge of the authors in this book just from reading and trying out the introductory examples on SOAP::Lite in PERL. It starts off with the trivial "Hello World" example of writing a SOAP server and a client. The authors didn't even get this one right! Already threre are errata submitted for this example on the oreilly.com site. I couldn't believe it! I mean, if you cannot get the "Hello World" example right, then what confidence do I have in the authors of presenting something more complex?
12 It should have focused on SOAP.
Hi I'm the one who wants to learn how to build cool apps with SOAP. To be honest, this book is not that practical. It certainly explains the overview, but in terms of developing a real application, I don't think this is useful.
It should have focused on only 1.) what is SOAP, 2.) how it works 3.) how to write code.
It tries to cover more broad, vague topic Web Services, which is more or less overview, as it is not ready for prime time.
How to use SOAP API should be not that difficult to understand, but what each SOAP envelope's xml tag syntax means are most important to me. It's so complex and this book doesn't explain clearly, which makes this book less valuable.
Looking forward to next improved edition.
13 Extremely good book
...This is an excellent book, very much on par with O'Reilly and deserving of it's current top ranking at the Web Services Journal Reader's Choice Awards. The book IS short (thank god) which is one of its strong points as it doesn't wax on about tons of useless crap and gets straight to the point. It also doesn't gloss over the areas where Web services technology is still lacking today (uh, security) and shows some nice simple examples to help developers get started. Great book, well worth the price and the time. Definite buy.
14 Disappointed, not a good book for programmer
Again, another bad book about Web Services. I was hoping that the O'Reilly version of programming with SOAP would be usable, but unfortunately, it's not.
There is only 174 pages of real information, and a lot is code. There is 70 pages of appendices, which is roughly 1/4 of the book. Any topics are so vaguely described that you still don't understand anything about programming with SOAP.
I got this book because it deals with Apache SOAP, something that I'm personally interested in, however a lot of the published stuff is almost taken straight from the documentation. Reading Apache's sparse documentation and going through their examples is probably a much better value that trying to go through this book.
The book also tries to deal with Perl, SOAP, and .NET programming. So for every example, he reiterates the same sample in 3 different forms, which is a waste of space. Because he splits his efforts amongst these three languages, his information is spread extremely thin.
There's not a lot of information that is given in this book, and I would avoid is entirely. Basically, it's [not worth it].
